Grasshopper Page 48

  ‘We’ll be seen from below,’ I said.

  ‘Not if we’re quick. They’re too busy inside the house. Ransacking the place, I expect.’

  What made me hide the passports instead of carrying them with me? Perhaps just the fact that I didn’t want to carry anything, not even three lightweight booklets. Or perhaps because, in the event of the police catching up with us, it seemed best not to add the possession of false passports to our list of crimes. I remembered too that story about the woman who had got three years in prison for ‘trafficking in human beings’. At the base of the nearest chimney stack was a hole in the brickwork, quite a deep cavity. I put the passports inside, reasoning that I’d be able to come back and fetch them the following day.

  The wind blew my long hair so that it streamed out horizontally. I felt suddenly strong and powerful, full of energy, my hands empty, my feet properly shod. Silver came over to me. The noisy wind cut off his words from the others.

  ‘Why did the police come this evening? What happened to bring them here now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I suppose they’ve been checking leads or whatever they call it. Maybe they’ve found the Louis Robinson connection.’

  ‘Not Sean, surely? Not Liv.’ Silver shook his head, then took my hand and squeezed it. ‘Let’s go.’

  Before Alison could protest, he told Jason to run across the damaged roof area, keeping close to the parapet. Jason was light and quick. He alone of us could do it safely. And he did it, as swift and light-footed and unafraid on the flapping tarpaulin in the gathering dark as if he were running across a lawn in the sunshine.

  ‘Good boy,’ Silver said. ‘Now you take the balcony, Andrew.’

  I didn’t expect him to obey but he did. He climbed rather clumsily over the parapet and dropped on to the balcony, scraping the soles of his shoes against the brickwork. He landed much more heavily than a fit person would have done and the walkway shuddered and groaned as its broken back felt his weight.

  ‘Hold on to the step,’ said Silver.

  Andrew clung on, raised himself on to the tips of his toes, or as near to the tips as he could get in those hard leather shoes. He must have weighed fourteen stone. His hands went red and his knuckles white with the strain. The worst bit to cross was the crack. I fancied it had got wider since he dropped so heavily. But he did cross it with painful slowness and managed a few yards more, the school bag swinging from his shoulder, his feet dragging along the floor. Then there was the business, difficult for those not experienced in roof-climbing, of hauling himself up on to the leads again. Swinging yourself upwards so that your bent legs are on a level with your head and upper body is something all children can do. Grown-ups soon lack the strength for it. The muscles of their upper arms and backs grow flaccid. And so it was with Andrew. He tried, he made the effort, but his muscles lacked the necessary power. There was a window ahead, a window behind which people lived, but he had to take the risk of being seen and climb the architrave. He made it, hooking one leg, then the other, over the parapet and dropping on to the leads, gasping with the effort, his hands grazed and bleeding. Jason was waiting for him, laughing with delight. He threw himself on Andrew, the way children do when showing pleasure and love, and Andrew took him in his arms, giving him a smothering hug.

  All this time I had been keeping an eye on the activity, or lack of it, in front of No. 4. Vivien Nyland had come down into the street and was talking to someone at the wheel of a police car. A man came out of the house, possibly her husband, but it was too dark to see clearly. Then two policemen came down the steps and four more went up them and into the house. And suddenly it was dark no longer. Car headlights came on, brilliant beams, an explosion of light almost blinding me. I shouted to everyone to keep down but Alison, with Silver to help her, had already descended on to the balcony. The beams flooded it like searchlights. The trees offered the two of them some protection, but the lights penetrated the flailing, twisting, leaf-burdened branches, in scattered rays. A beam of light struck Silver’s bright blond head and made a spot of dazzlement. Afraid the end might be near, I went back to the chimney stack and pushed the passports right to the back of the cavity.

  I had to reach a decision: whether to follow Silver and Alison on to the balcony or attempt a crossing of the tarpaulin. I couldn’t make up my mind. If we were going to be caught, I wanted to be with Silver. Suppose we weren’t? Suppose they failed to reach us before we had crossed the remaining roofs to safety? In that case I ought to get to the end of the terrace and be there to help the others down the nailhead steps on to the house that stood alone.

  The searchlight had moved away. Darkness came down like a curtain until my eyes accustomed themselves to it. What I saw on the balcony frightened me. Alison was frozen where she stood, unable to move, her hands not gripping the stone ridge but flat against the brickwork. I said she was frozen but just the same I thought I saw her body shaking, a continuous tremor thrilling through it. Silver had hauled himself up on to a window frame. The room inside, part of one of the fire-damaged flats, was of course empty. I could hear him whispering quite coolly and calmly to Alison to put one of her hands on the step and give him the other, he’d hold her, he’d guide her across the crack. Slowly, after much more urging, she drew her hands from the bricks and stood, holding on to nothing, looking wildly around her.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Silver was saying. ‘Take it slowly. Give me your right hand. Give me your hand now, Alison. I’ll put both of your hands on the step and all the while I’ll hold you under your arms. You’re quite safe.’

  She took not the least notice of what he said. He slid down the architrave on to the windowsill, put down one foot on to the balcony floor, then, gingerly, the other.

  ‘No, Silver,’ I said to him in a loud whisper. ‘No. Don’t.’

  They were both on the balcony, on one side of the widening crack. I don’t know what possessed Alison, I shall never know. She looked down. She and Andrew had denied that any of them was afraid of heights but she was. It takes one to know one, and I could always recognize a phobic. She looked down over the sagging iron balustrade, down through the swinging thready branches and the shuddering leaves, to the paving and the grass plots forty feet below. Pools of light lay down there and blocks of shadow. She looked down and then she ran. As Jason had run but at twice Jason’s weight. One of her feet caught in the crack, and as she stumbled and pulled it free, the stone walkway began to split. It seemed to happen very slowly, to take a lifetime, as the two sides parted with a grinding crunching sound, the fissure between them gradually widening. Then the half furthest from Silver separated itself, appeared for a moment to hover in the air, and fell away. A lifetime, it seemed, it was probably about thirty seconds, just as the time it took to fall was no more than half that. The silence was broken by the sound it made landing on the paving below, a splintering and an echoing roar.

  Alison’s feet slid from under her and she fell backwards, her body on the intact half of the balcony floor, her legs hanging over the fractured edge. It looked like a miracle that she hadn’t gone down with the mass of masonry. Beryl told me afterwards that the crash its falling made brought crowds pouring out into Torrington Gardens. Flats and houses emptied. Meanwhile, the police cars’ headlights flared and the cars moved faster than I’d have thought possible, turning, snaking in and out, tearing up the street. Somewhere another siren blared. On the far side of the tarpaulin Andrew had been squatting. He got up and with Jason behind him, came to the parapet and looked down.

  Children have a completely different idea of danger from ours. They think themselves and everyone close to them immortal. If they have confidence in the grown-ups in whose care they are, they trust them to take care of them and themselves. So I suppose it was with Jason. With absolute reliance on Andrew to be in control of the situation, he was getting bored with it. He wanted something else to do. The bag Andrew was carrying was his bag, so without bothering to look down, with no interest what
ever in what was going on in the street or on the broken balcony, he undid the buckle on the bag to take a look inside, at the same time easing the strap off Andrew’s shoulder. A huge gust of wind blew the freed flap back and banknotes spiralled into the air.

  Andrew shouted out. He spun round, making hopeless grabs for the money as it flew. The wind was too high for him to stand a chance. I saw a purple note, a £20 note, brilliant in the searchlight, fly airily and come to rest in tree branches. But I didn’t stay to see any more. I climbed over the parapet myself, put one foot on the curved top of the nearest architrave, let the other drop on to the window ledge. I turned, my back to the façade now, spreadeagling myself against the broken blackened window. Silver was edging along what remained of the balcony to where Alison seemed to be sliding towards the brink. Repeatedly, he shouted at her to hold on. She took no notice. She was lying on her back, her hands beside her, palms upwards, her legs dangling over the chasm.

  Utterly silent, she was staring up at the glowing grey sky, across which the wind drove paler clouds scurrying. Crawling on all-fours now, Silver reached her. He squatted and stretched out his hands to take hold of her under her armpits. She might have been saved. Silver and I between us could have lifted her over the parapet and back on to the leads. I was watching and I’m sure I saw her edge a fraction away from him. I’ve never told anyone but Silver but that is what I saw. She turned her hands over, put them palms downwards on the balcony floor and pushed herself, the way when on a slide beside a swimming pool you give yourself a small shove to start the downward progress. I shall always believe her action was purposeful. She wanted to die. Her love for Andrew and his for her were over, and Jason would now, inevitably, be taken away from her. She had tried to find herself a child, she had tried too many times, and it was all for nothing. Now to put an end to it. She lay staring at the sky as if she was praying to it or making some final despairing statement. Then she moved her hands, placed them on the stone floor beneath her to get a purchase, and slid forward. With sudden swifter momentum she slipped over the edge, still silent, giving herself to the force of gravity. A swirl of banknotes accompanied her, dancing round her falling body, drifting down.

  Silver had fallen on his knees. He knelt there, quite still, his eyes shut. Down in the street an ambulance had come, a fire engine had come. The men were bringing out ladders. I said, ‘Stay where you are. Wait.’

  He gave no sign of having heard. ‘They’ll get you down,’ I said.

  He opened his eyes then and looked at me. ‘This thing is rocking like a boat on the sea.’ A ship in a bottle? ‘I’ve got to get off it.’ Then he said, ‘Is she dead? She must be.’

  I turned my body, faced into the window again and kicked in the broken glass and the half-burnt sash. I raised the remaining sash, making a cavity in which to seat myself. ‘I don’t know.’ I seemed to keep on saying I didn’t know. ‘If you won’t wait for them, can you reach me? If I lean forward, can you take hold of my hands?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  He got very carefully and gradually to his feet. He was facing me. I saw him sink. I saw the remains of the balcony dip, give a final shudder like an earth tremor and tear itself away from the wall. It made a crumbling roar as it fell. Silver leapt for the window and I caught his hands. Below him was a void, a great wound in the wall where the balcony had been He made no sound but hung there, suspended from my hands. It was the pylon all over again, I and my lover on the heights, high above the abyss.

  I knew I couldn’t hold him. It was even harder than with Daniel. Him, at least, I had held round the waist, I had held on to his clothes, and would have saved him if help had come sooner. Now all I had was my hands and Silver’s. I slid backwards into the opening where the window had been. I put his right hand on the lower frame, though I knew I’d lacerate it in the process on the chips of glass. I bent as far forward as I could, reaching for his underarm. By the time the other hand was on the frame and he was wincing, his face contorted from the pain of the the glass splinters, I had both my hands under his arms. He began pulling himself up, careless of his cut hands. Strength comes at these times, though from where you don’t know. There’s a final spurt that seems to stem from absolute, ultimate need. Thin though I was and three-quarters of his weight, I made my gargantuan effort and lifted him till his upper body was lying across the sill. His poor hands hung bleeding inside the black and filthy wall.

  The first ladder was put up against the brickwork as he brought one leg and then the other over the sill and down on to the floor of the room. I kissed him and I kissed his bleeding hands.

  ‘You saved my life.’

  ‘It was time I saved a life,’ I said. ‘It’s good it was yours.’

  A fireman’s head appeared in the window opening. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘A couple of kids.’

  34

  I’m expecting him home within two hours, just time enough to finish this. To put the diaries away, because I made no more entries for a year, and write from memory. Perhaps to get some of the time scale wrong and put events in the wrong sequence. To remember and do my best. Even if I get things in the wrong order, the facts will be as they were.

  After we had been brought down by the firemen, after we had been arrested and Alison’s body taken away, more and more people flocked into Torrington Gardens. They were after Andrew’s money and they went on coming for days. £20 and £10 notes littered the pavement and stuck in the trees and drifted under the wheels of cars. Some sandwiched themselves between the little leafy twigs of privet hedges, some caught under windscreen wipers. And they were always on the move because the wind kept up all night.

  It was Beryl who told me this, making a story out of it that would become a legend in Maida Vale. ‘They was mostly deadbeats as came. Bagwomen and dossers. Like bundles of rags, some of them was. There was one old bugger as broke his wrist trying to get a tenner out of a drain, they had to take him to St Mary’s. Mind you, there was tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, down there, untold thousands. I picked up fifty meself.’

  How much money did Andrew have in that school bag? More than we guessed, far more than he had led us to believe. But still nothing like the vast fortune that was rumoured.

  All that was much later. We were taken to Paddington Green police station and spent the night there. In the morning, the day Morna was to call for Jason and take him to Heathrow and thence Sydney, we appeared in court, Silver’s hands white bundles of bandages. We had forgotten all about Morna, which wasn’t perhaps surprising. She went round to 4 Torrington Gardens at the appointed time, found no one in Flat E and finally got the facts out of a furious Vivien Nyland, or the facts as she knew them.

  They threw the book at us. I think that’s the expression for when the police find as many charges as they can to level at you. Some of them were absurd, some justifiable enough. I suppose we were guilty of conspiracy, we did aid and abet an abduction and false imprisonment and we did resist arrest. A manslaughter charge against Silver was mooted and dropped. It all came to nothing much in the end. In the Crown Court we were given conditional discharges, which meant we were free but would have a criminal record for ever. Before that, we got bail.

  Much the same thing happened in Andrew’s case. I think everyone, even the Crown Prosecution Service, was sorry for him because of what had happened to Alison, but he wasn’t allowed to keep Jason. I read in the paper recently that he had married a woman who already had two children, had sold his father’s house and used the money to set himself up in a PR business. He is a tireless campaigner (as they say) for a change in the laws covering adoption. Journalists always follow up these stories, probably pursuing the protagonists until they die of old age. But no one pursued Jason. I don’t know what happened to him or where he is now. I hope he was adopted, or at least fostered, by people he could love as plainly as he loved Andrew and Alison and that he got a better chance than looked likely.

  Silver and I were separated, that is, our parents se
parated us. I went home for a while to Suffolk. Things were different from what they had been after the pylon, for then everyone accused me of corrupting my boyfriend and leading him astray. This time Silver and I were accused of corrupting each other. I was a bad influence on him and he on me. Otherwise life in Suffolk was as bad as last time. My mother decided I was a lost soul, or almost lost, only to be redeemed by getting engaged to, working for, and ultimately marrying, Guy Wharton.

  For he had reappeared, still faithful, still wanting me. Mum adored him. I felt quite sorry for her, so set on something she could never have, so absolutely doomed to disappointment. Dad wasn’t so keen. I once heard him describe Guy as ‘any port in a storm’. Silver phoned me, he wrote to me. I wasn’t told about the calls and I never got the letters. Mum used to go up our drive just before the time the one post a day came and collect the letters from the postman. Because we had no answering machine Silver couldn’t leave a message. The Silvermans were so determined no letter of mine should reach Silver that they had a redirection notice put on 15 Russia Road, forwarding all letters for him to their home in St Albans where he never went. Last year Jack told me, laughing, that he had had no compunction about forging Silver’s signature to get that notice. And by then I could laugh too.

  I went to London to look for him. Jack and Erica had changed the lock on the front door and my key no longer worked. What no one knew or had forgotten was that I still had a key to No. 19. It was February, just before my twenty-first birthday. Eleven in the morning seemed a good time to effect an entry, as the police say. They said it several times to us while we awaited our first court appearance. I went stealthily down the iron staircase and let myself into old Mrs Fisherton’s. There were no longer any signs of Caroline’s occupancy. No doubt she had moved upstairs with Max months before. It seemed darker, mustier and drearier than ever. As I had guessed, no one was in. The house was empty. I climbed out of Max’s study window on to the roof.