Grasshopper Page 3

  I was ignorant about electricity myself once, criminally ignorant, you might say, and it cost me dear, me and Daniel, especially Daniel. If I’m out of my glass house now and can therefore throw stones, I’ll never forget being inside it, I’ll never forget messing with the mystery and the way it struck back.

  Tufnell Park to home on North Hill took me ten minutes. It’d be less than five when the traffic is light. The block I live in is ten floors high and so far, unlike in Beryl’s tower on the Harrow Road, the lift has always been in working order. My flats are called Cityscape Court but you can see far more than the city from my roof garden: the river like a silver string, Greenwich and the Observatory and the green hills beyond, a segment of the Millennium Dome if you know where to look for it, a hundred church spires and towers, the Royal Festival Hall and the National Theatre, and on this side the Palace of Westminster with the sun shining on its bright pinnacles and the face of Big Ben. I did what I always do at this hour, if I’m home in good time, that is, and if it’s warm enough, take my drink out on to the roof garden, sit in one of my very comfortable loungers at my cane and glass table and gaze and gaze at the great panorama that lies below and around me. Earth hath not anything to show more fair, as the only poem I ever remember learning at school puts it. But no, not the only one, there was another, and that too is part of this story that I’m writing. Having kept a diary as I went along, not every day or even every week but just from time to time, is going to help me do that.

  In winter I sit just inside the window or glass wall, rather, that forms the whole garden side of my flat. In summer or on warm spring evenings or in autumn before the air gets damp and the chill settles in, I’m outside. There’s only one person I really want and he’s 3,000 miles away. So, apart from that, being alone at this time suits me fine. Besides, I’m not alone, I’ve got Mabel. She always comes out from whichever bed she’s been on to greet me when I get home and always accompanies me outside.

  I don’t want to be disturbed, I want to sit and gaze and stroke Mabel on my lap and think about my day and drink my drink. Always gin and tonic or vodka and soda, by the way. In my opinion, unless you’re a wine drinker, you’re either a white-spirit person or a brown-spirit person and I’m the former. I’m sociable enough, I like to see my friends – I’d rather see my husband but that can’t be, not yet – I like it a lot if Darren drops in as he sometimes does on his way to Junilla’s or Campaspe’s, or if other friends come, but not before eight, please. By eight I’ve had my drink and thought my thoughts and gazed my fill and I’m ready to eat.

  That evening, not unnaturally, those thoughts were of twelve years ago. Along with my gin and tonic I’d brought outside those diary extracts and that curious story I’d written at maybe a therapist’s behest. Strange, but I nearly said ‘she’ there instead of ‘I’, yet I know quite well it was me to whom all those things happened, not another. Whatever some people say, and I think Liv may be one of them, we were not once ‘someone else’, we didn’t live in ‘another life’ or a ‘different world’, that’s just a cop-out, a way of defending our actions because since then, of course, we’ve changed out of all knowledge, we’re not ‘the same person’. But we are. The girl who climbed pylons and the girl who scaled the roofs is me, and without her and the things she did and the crimes, if you like, she committed, I wouldn’t be the woman I am today. And for better, for worse, she’s all I have.

  One thing, for the story I wrote the evening I got to Max’s house, I underplayed the feelings I had about the underground. I made it look as if being in it, its passages, its escalators and above all its trains, wasn’t so bad, just a bit unpleasant but something I could control. In fact, it was very different from that. I went down into it without knowing what it was, having had no experience of it since I was a small child, and found the very heart of terror. If you’ve ever read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, you’ll remember the torture of Winston Smith with the things he fears more than any others, the objects of his phobia. In his case it was white rats, in mine it would be tunnels. I have never been in the underground since that afternoon. I shall never forget it.

  These days I can manage below ground level. I’ve had to, I’ve had to work in basements and cellars, and I don’t like it, but it was either that or pick another trade. Airline pilot? Steeplejack? Bungee-jumping instructor? I’ve dealt with my problem by telling myself it was the only obstacle I had to surmount once I had begun on the one thing I really wanted to do. The course itself wasn’t difficult, perhaps because I loved it, the maths wasn’t a problem for long, and when I started on the practical work I was in my element. All right, a pun was intended there. So I disciplined myself when I had to work underground and I did it by concentrating on the work and the work only, doing my best not to look around me, not to see the walls, the lack of windows, not to feel the ceiling dipping down to crush me. Sometimes I could even teach myself to imagine different surroundings while I was down there, a high-up airy glass roof (rather like Liv’s), wide-open doors, and through them all the bright blue and white sky. But mostly I applied myself to the microcosm of the cables in front of me, the new point I was putting in, the small immediate area of intricate but precise wiring. Guy Wharton once told me that in the sweatshops of the East End women employees were preferred for the french polishing because their fingers were smaller and more delicate than men’s. And that’s one of the reasons women make good electricians. I think I perfected the technique of using my small (I don’t know about delicate) fingers accurately and fast down in those subterranean places because I seldom looked elsewhere but at what those fingers were doing, and never paused or got up to stretch or to smoke a cigarette until the job was done and I was out of there.

  But that evening in September when I first came to Russia Road and Max’s house, I was as bad a claustrophobic as you can be. It had all started when Dad took me with him to wash the car. I was about ten. Our local garage had had a car wash put in, the latest thing, I suppose it was, in Suffolk in the seventies. Dad was thrilled, he’d never used one, and he hated cleaning the car. And, to do him justice, he thought I’d be thrilled too. It was to be a treat.

  You had to put coins into a slot machine in those days, it was before punching in a code came in. Dad put in the coins, checked all the windows were shut, and moved the car forward until the light went red. I didn’t know what to expect and I don’t suppose he did. I probably thought it would be a bit like a bigger and more powerful shower and I had no idea it would start so quickly. The roar it made was like a threat. And the big red brushes coming so fast, covering the whole car in a swirling mass which shut out all light and air, which seemed to be swallowing the car in its gulping crimson throat, that was what started me screaming. Dad was angry, he thought I was fooling around, pretending to be frightened, and he was rough with me. I put my hand over my mouth to stop the sounds coming and then the worst thing happened. The whole roof came down, a metal bar moving towards the windscreen. It was going to smash the glass, pass right through the glass and crash into my face, it was going to chop my head off. I tried to get out, of course I did. I opened the door and water came into the car, I was screaming all the time. That the bar wasn’t going to cut my head off or smash my brains to a pulp – well, that was evident by then but I was still screaming. When they say someone is beside herself, that describes how I was. Dad didn’t know what to do, I can see that now, but I didn’t then. The car was filling with water inside. He had to get the door shut before the metal frame part of the car wash ripped it off and he had to calm me down, which he did by slapping my face. I suppose he was nearly as frightened as I was. I was afraid of being swallowed up by the car wash but he was afraid his daughter had gone mad.

  That was the beginning of it. I had never done anything about it and no one had ever shown much interest. All Dad wanted to do was forget and when I told Mum she thought I was exaggerating. But really, what could they have done? Did they even know I had a phobia about enclosed sp
aces? For one thing, the Suffolk countryside is probably one of the best places on earth to be a claustrophobic, except for the Sahara Desert. It’s all wide open spaces, huge fields, enormous skies, flat land, level horizons. Apart from seaside resorts, there must be more bungalows in Suffolk than anywhere in the British Isles, and you seldom find an ordinary house more than two storeys high. There may be underpasses beneath a few big roads but I’d never seen them. I’d never seen caves either or houses with cellars. Our house was all on two floors with big picture windows and my school was a modern building mostly made of glass. The world there was a claustrophobic’s paradise. And suddenly I was in Russia Road, having arrived after a terrible journey through tunnels, to find myself doomed to live for three years, a lifetime when you’re nineteen, in a place where very little light ever came and no window’s top reached even as far as street level.

  Max’s grandmother had lived down there. He told me so while we had supper. As soon as he could afford it, he bought the house and moved her into the basement from the place she lived in near Paddington Station, a Victorian cottage which was damp and subsiding and due to be demolished. After his father had left home and his mother died, she had brought him up in that house and made many sacrifices for him so that he could have his chance of a good education. Here Max, being Max, couldn’t resist saying that of course he won scholarships and that helped. His grandmother was very old when he brought her to Russia Road and past ninety when she died.

  ‘She didn’t actually die downstairs, if that’s what you’re thinking, darling,’ Selina said. ‘She doesn’t haunt the place.’

  I hadn’t supposed she did. That would have been the least of my worries. Max looked pained, as if suggesting that coming back as a ghost was an insult to old Mrs Fisherton’s memory, as perhaps it was.

  ‘All the furniture was hers,’ he said fondly. ‘I’ve kept it just as she left it.’

  His face wore that dreamy sorrowful look it often did when he spoke of the past. Twelve years ago he must have been about sixty. He’s dead now but he was my mother’s first cousin, her father’s brother’s son, that brother being the man who had deserted his family when his child was just two. Max was a professor of Modern History at London University. By the sound of it he had spent all his twenties getting one degree after another, he had more of them than anyone I’ve ever come across. All that time, my mother used to say, old Mrs Fisherton went out office cleaning and flat cleaning to give him an allowance over and above whatever it was the scholarships paid. He was a very tall, very thin man for his age, a condition of fitness he put down to jogging round Regen’s Park three mornings a week. I never saw him dressed otherwise than casually, in tracksuits most of the time, through the round necklines of which his long scaly neck emerged like a turtle’s. For work he wore a tweed jacket over one of those tracksuit tops and a pair of baggy trousers. His face was not so much boyish as babyish, though of course an elderly baby’s. His smooth forehead bulged and so did his cheeks, his eyes were round and his nose turned up. What hair he had left he grew long at the back, to compensate perhaps for the lack of much at the front. It was white and fluffy and covered his ears.

  Strangely enough, for Selina was thought of as good-looking, he and she were rather alike. You could have taken her for his much younger sister. She was – is, I suppose – a small woman but no one would have called her short, for that word implies stockiness and solidity. Selina is slight and dainty, a Barbie doll or a fairy on a Christmas tree. Her legs are shapely and beautifully carved, as if made of some pale shiny wood such as sycamore and turned on a lathe. Her face is shaped like a plump heart and her eyes bulge a little, her nose is delicately tip-tilted, her mouth another heart. Round cheeks repeat themselves in her alarmingly large, gravity-defying breasts which pout and bounce, the nipples showing themselves like fingertips pointing through her clothes whenever she is animated.

  I never saw her in trousers or sweaters. She was as formal in her dress as he was casual, favouring little suits with short flared skirts and nipped-waist jackets or dresses with belts and big padded shoulders. Lots of jewellery, lots of heavy make-up, her nails always painted, her mouth outlined in dark red and filled in with rose-pink to make it look even juicier and plumper. I’ve met a lot of actresses over the past few years, seeing to the electrics in their flats and houses, some of them very famous, and off-set or off-stage they’ve always looked – well, like me, jeans and T-shirts, no make-up, and as if they’ve never seen the inside of a hairdresser’s. Perhaps Selina hadn’t been in the business long enough to get into actressy ways. After years spent ‘resting’ or taking jobs not much better than an extra’s, she’d auditioned for the part of Annabel, the licensee of the Crown and Anchor in Streetwise, never expecting to get it or if she did that the serial would run and run, be still running after fourteen years, and its four stars become more famous than actors who had been on the stage for a lifetime.

  He and she seemed as unsuited to each other as any couple I’ve ever known. He was dry, academic, censorious, short-tempered with anything he called ignorance, an intellectual snob; she was almost uneducated, frivolous and flashy. She loved parties, going to them and giving them, the kind where people never sit down but stand around, talking media gossip, and no one knows anyone else better than as a party acquaintance. But in spite of the ‘darlings’, the word she used with everyone from Max to the man who came to mend the dishwasher, she was as cold and wary, judgemental, impatient as he.

  So perhaps they did have things in common. He met her when his university gave her an honorary degree. Not a doctorate, they were too mean for that and she, after all, was only the star of a sitcom. They gave her an M.Litt. (Drama). I expect they made it up for the occasion. Max was at the degree congregation and afterwards the Vice-Chancellor asked him to sit next to her at tea. He hadn’t wanted to, he’d tried to get out of it, but after they’d eaten their sandwiches and their meringues he was in love for the first time in his life and a lost man. At least, according to Selina’s often repeated account of this meeting, he was. I heard it for the first time that first evening, Max sitting by, picking at his microwaved prefrozen lasagne and defrosted petits pois, saying nothing but sometimes giving little tight smiles, not sympathizing or approving or even remembering, but as if he knew some secret that Selina and I didn’t. Perhaps it was only his own intellectual superiority to almost everyone.

  We had a Sara Lee chocolate cake for the next course and then Nescafé with Longlife cream. My mother was a good cook and I wasn’t used to this sort of food. I sound ungrateful, I was ungrateful, but although I didn’t know it then, it was not only the first but, with the exception of a birthday lunch, the last meal I was ever to be given by Selina and Max. When it was over, the moment we got up from the table, she dismissed me below stairs, with the words, ‘You’ll want to settle in, darling, so we’ll say good night.’

  There were five minutes to go before half past eight, and what I also didn’t know then but soon learnt was that on every weekday evening she was at home she watched herself in Streetwise. If not at home, she was bound not to be far from a television set, and her hosts at whatever gathering she was at would be obliged to suffer half an hour of banality in Floral Grove, SW 12. I really shouldn’t take this superior line, it’s wrong of me, for I watched it myself evening after evening for a long time, having nothing better to do than sit close up to old Mrs Fisherton’s black and white set, staring at the screen rather than at the encroaching walls and descending ceiling.

  Selina said that she supposed I hadn’t brought anything with me for my breakfast. There were shops not far away that stayed open ‘till all hours’. I wouldn’t want to go ‘out there at this hour’, she said in a doubtful interrogatory tone. Perhaps she expected me to say there was nothing I’d like better than foraging for food in the sinister twilit streets of Maida Vale, but I didn’t, I didn’t know what to say. All my life breakfast had just appeared, to be eaten or rejected as it took my fancy.
I was spoilt, wasn’t I? I took too much for granted. Selina began one of those conversations with herself that were quite common with her and the only times she didn’t call the person she was talking to ‘darling’. How would I manage for breakfast? She could let me have something. Yes, but what? They never had cooked breakfasts, did they? She had to watch her figure for professional reasons. Perhaps cornflakes could be managed. What about bread? I would need butter and milk, there was no end to it. Still, it was only the once and after that, when I had settled in…

  Max took absolutely no notice of any of this. He had got up, found himself a book and come back to the table where he sat reading with total concentration. I just stood there, aware of the light in this dining room and realizing that the big triple-paned arched window was the one where the girl’s face was among the lilies and the vine leaves. I realized too, though it may not have been at that precise time, that once I had got used to the concept of a flat in a house, I simply took it for granted that it would be in the top of that house, would in fact be the top floor.

  I took the tray of food Selina gave me, two slices from a sliced loaf, a pat of butter, a teabag and about a quarter of a pint of milk in a small water glass, a bowl of cornflakes and a plate with a spoonful of marmalade on the edge of it. Also on the tray was a key.

  ‘You’ve got your own door into the area, darling.’

  What was an area, apart from being a piece of land or a part of a town? I didn’t like to ask. No doubt I would find out.

  ‘Good night, then,’ Selina said. She tapped the spine of Max’s book with a long orchid-pink fingernail. ‘Say good night, darling.’

  ‘Good night,’ said Max, without looking up.

  The Streetwise signature tune followed me downstairs. I put the hall light on before taking the plunge to the subterranean. It was rather like diving into a pool of dark water whose depth you’ve no idea of but you know it’s many fathoms and it may drown you. I didn’t really plunge, though, I walked down carefully, carrying my tray, and fumbled about on the wall till I found the switch. The lamps at old Mrs Fisherton’s (which was what I came to call the place) were all of very low wattage. Forty watts, I suppose now. Then, though I know in saying this that I’m presenting myself as just as feeble as those lamps – sorry, that’s an electrician’s word, lightbulbs to you – I thought it was the way things were and there was nothing I could do about it.