Grasshopper Read online

  Time passed – how much time? I don’t know, I’ve never asked and no one told me. It may have been only minutes, perhaps half an hour. My hold on Daniel was growing weaker, he was sliding ever so gradually over the angle, his body collapsing, all its strength lost. He dragged me with him, pulling me down. Being tormented on the rack must feel the way I felt then, when the torturer screws more tightly. My arms were stretched to the uttermost, straining till they felt tugged from their sockets. His leg slid off the steel bar, and I could do nothing to stop it. He hung then like a sack, like a carcass on a hook. But my hands were the hook and I could stand no more. The pain of it was huge, shooting from my shoulders down my back in great shuddering thrusts and burning in my brain. My own body was bent half over, my head pressing against his back, and he was slipping. I knew I’d have to let go. Balanced with a bar supporting each underarm lest I fall myself, I opened my hands. I had to, I couldn’t hold on any longer.

  He fell, plunging to the ground cleanly, clear of the pylon, down and down, twisting a little, his arms like wings. The grass down there received him silently and he lay spreadeagled, as the lights of the cars appeared round the curve in the road. Thank God he made no sound. He was dead.

  6

  I was sitting on my roof terrace with Mabel on my lap and my gin and tonic at my elbow, trying to guess the identity of a castellated building I could just see on the South Bank, when Darren called round. He often does at this sort of time, he’s usually on his way to Junilla, who lives in Crouch End, or Campaspe, who lives in Stroud Green. I asked him if he’d like a drink but he refused.

  ‘I’m driving and, besides, I don’t like Callum smelling liquor on my breath.’

  ‘So it’s Junilla tonight, is it?’

  My tone annoyed him. He hung over the roof garden wall, muttering that he wanted to check on what someone had told him, that you could see Harrow-on-the-Hill from here. Darren has a son by one of his girlfriends and a daughter by the other. He knows I don’t approve, though my disapproval mainly takes the form of laughing at his domestic arrangements. In spite of having a flat of his own in Hendon, he spends almost every night with one or other of the girlfriends. To see his children, he says. ‘No nonsense’, with those girls, Afro-trash, as he calls them. I don’t believe a word of it but he insists sex is in the past, all over and a mistake at the time but too late now. He’s a good father, attentive and anxious, and he supports Callum and Olympia heroically. The refusal of a drink lest his son detect it on his breath was typical.

  ‘I wouldn’t say no to an orange juice,’ he said.

  I fetched it, with lots of ice. The day had been very warm. I don’t expect him to have a reason for calling but he always has one. This time it was to talk about the Paddington Basin project, we’d have to take on extra help. I wasn’t kidding myself he and I could do it on our own, was I? How about our regular customers? Or suppose there was an emergency? Darren strolled about the roof garden, lifting his hands, opening them, nodding and shaking his head. He’s never much of a one for sitting down. Very tall, slim, with that peculiar feline grace that belongs only to the black man, a lazy, laid-back carriage, he’s one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen. Silver wasn’t in the same league. Darren is very dark, his skin is matt ebony and his hair coal-black tight curls that he wears very short and like a crown on top of his head, the sides and nape being closely shaved. His two gold earrings he has discarded since Olympia told him dads don’t wear them.

  ‘What do you suggest?’ I said, knowing he’d have some relative or friend up his sleeve.

  ‘Campaspe’s brother. He’s a good bloke and a good workman.’

  ‘All right. Have him round and we’ll give him the once-over.’

  ‘I’ll have another orange juice if that’s OK and then I’ll be on my way.’

  ‘Help yourself. It’s in the fridge.’

  Mabel slipped off my lap and followed him in. I heard him saying, ‘Kitty, kitty, kitty…’ and hoped he wasn’t giving her milk, which she loves but is bad for her. Darren had never been into the flat that way before, until a week before it hadn’t been warm enough to sit outside, and when he came out again with his orange juice he said, ‘Who’s the young guy in the silver frame?’

  I realized when he said that how young Daniel looked in that photograph and that he would stay young for ever as I grew older. People would soon start asking me if he was my nephew or my godson.

  ‘Just someone I used to spend some time with,’ I said.

  ‘OK, Emmylou, I won’t probe.’

  I nearly told him then about the pylon. I would have if he hadn’t looked at his watch and said he wanted to get to Junilla’s before Callum’s bedtime. After he had gone I thought how I don’t tell people, I’ve told no one but Silver since I came to London, perhaps because while I was still living at home with my parents everyone knew, I used to think the whole of Suffolk knew. In London, however little I was aware of it at the time, I was making a new start.

  Max and Selina were in the secret, of course. I overheard my mother talking to Max about it on the phone.

  ‘She doesn’t have to know, does she?’ I said, meaning Selina.

  ‘Of course she does. She’s his wife.’

  They told a lot of people. Those friends and neighbours who came to the party, I expect. I’m sure they told Beryl. They told her in the Christmas holidays, I think, because the next time I saw her on my return she was tender with me, very considerate and thoughtful. I needed cheering up, she said, as she polished old Mrs Fisherton’s furniture and dusted the photograph frames, a young girl like me shouldn’t be depressed.

  To cheer me up she chatted away. She told me about the neighbours, the people next door and those next door to them, all the ones she worked for. That a cleaner with a key to her employers’ homes might have a duty of discretion never seemed to occur to her. She took it for granted that in allowing her the freedom of their houses they also gave her permission to broadcast what she saw, learnt, picked up and read while there.

  The Ahmeds she disliked, largely, I think, because they failed to give her a ‘Christmas box’. They were mean, cheese-paring. On the days she was there they locked up the drinks cupboard and took away the key. It was her belief they emptied the place of food too because the last time she was in their flat there was nothing in the fridge but half a lemon and a bottle of Highland Spring. The minimalists at 13 she never saw, had never seen. Mrs Clark, the doctor’s wife at 17, had recommended her and they had taken her on without interviewing her or even speaking to her on the phone. The key was given to her by Mrs Clark. Her money was always there waiting for her in ‘a nice clean envelope with nothing written on it’, which meant she could use it again. The interior of 13B fascinated her. Although the floors were covered in bright blue carpet, the furniture was sparse and in ‘weird shapes’. She couldn’t imagine sitting in those chairs. A picture that took up half a wall of a nude woman lying on a table among pieces of fruit put her off her lunch. The owners of the flat were called Michael Harding and Susan Potter and they were not married, a fact worthy of Beryl’s comment, though not particularly of her disapproval.

  ‘You know as much as I do now, love. Ive told you everything I know.’

  She had a far more extensive knowledge of the Silverman family. Silverman, she said, was a Jewish name. The girl was as pretty as a picture, the living image of Princess Diana, but she didn’t live there any more, she lived with some bloke somewhere, the way the young all did these days. The older boy was dark but the younger boy was so fair, with hair so blond it was white, that you’d have taken him for an albino till you saw his eyes. His eyes were grey, not a very dark grey but grey enough, not pink like someone she’d been at school with in Queen’s Park in the thirties.

  ‘I don’t reckon they let it happen these days,’ she said. ‘They do something about it. In the womb.’

  Mr Silverman had a business, he had a factory near St Albans ‘or somewhere up there’, makin
g glue. Well, not exactly glue, but what was the word? Adhesives? That was it, adhesives, stick-on labels and sticky tape and whatever. He and Mrs lived in a big house out in the country like the ones you saw in TV dramas. They only came to London once in a blue moon. The place never got dirty, she only gave it the once-over every couple of weeks, but they sent her her cheque as if she spring-cleaned the place every couple of days. They’d let the son, the very fair one, have the top flat to live in while he was studying at some college. His first name was something ordinary, she couldn’t remember what, but everyone called him Silver. On account of him being so fair and being called Silverman. Even his parents called him Silver.

  ‘I don’t reckon Mr Silverman and Mrs know how many he’s got living up there. They come and go, but last time I was in there, there was the chap and the girl and the other chap as you might call permanent fixtures as well as that Silver and two others I’d never set eyes on before. Mind you, he don’t let me in there. I’ve offered but he always says he likes it the way it is, he don’t like it clean.’

  I asked her how she knew all those people were there if she never went in.

  ‘There’s a front door to that top flat and it’s got, like, a glass panel in it.’ She said this without a trace of shame. ‘I have a squint through that after I’ve done the top bedrooms. Seven he had up in there with him on Monday.’

  ‘Do the permanent fixtures live there all the time?’

  ‘They sleep there, I do know that. The one that looks like Yul Brynner and the girl and the little dark one.’

  ‘Yul Brynner?’ I said.

  ‘You’re young,’ said Beryl, ‘but you must know who he is. Didn’t you never see The King and I on TV?’

  It had been shown the week before. It usually is around Christmas and the New Year. I was still at my parents, who had a huge colour television. The King and I requires colour, it wouldn’t have come over very well on old Mrs Fisherton’s black and white set. The strange thing was that a few days later I saw him, ‘the one that looks like Yul Brynner’, I mean. I identified him from Beryl’s description, there could be no doubt. It was my first day back at GUP and I was walking along the canal at Paddington Basin, my invariable route to avoid the underground, when I saw him on the opposite bank, talking to someone on the roof of a houseboat. I mean that the other person was on the roof of the houseboat. He was on the towpath. It could have been the King of Siam standing there, tall and thin with that same high-cheekboned pale brown Mongolian face, his head shaven. It was a cold morning in January and though he may have been wearing an embroidered satin jacket – I later discovered that he did, in fact, wear clothes like that – he had a huge and very dirty ankle-length sheepskin coat on top. While he talked he was eating, and offering the other man, squares he broke off a bar of chocolate.

  Often, when I look forward to things, I’ve found I’m disappointed, and when I dread something it turns out to be not so bad. That didn’t apply to my return to GUP, which I had really dreaded and which in the event was even worse than I had expected. That term, as part of the psychology course, we had groups scheduled and someone told me that meant group therapy, ten or twelve of us sitting round and telling the rest what went on in our heads. We’d be expected to talk about our childhoods and our relationships with our parents and, worst of all, traumatic events in our lives.

  I missed the first session. It was on one of the days that I simply failed to go. There were a lot of those days by the time my twentieth birthday came in February. I didn’t plan them, I’d simply wake up in the morning, look at the clock and decide I wasn’t going in. I’d get up late and, instead of hanging about indoors battling against claustrophobia, wander round Maida Vale and Paddington, looking at buildings, especially the tops of buildings, following the course of the canal and dropping into cafés for a coffee or a milk shake and a sandwich. Once I ventured all alone into a pub and asked for a glass of white wine. No one stared, no one thought it odd, and after that I’d often have a drink in a pub with a roll or a hot pie for my lunch.

  We sometimes have a sunny week in February. We did that year, it was warm and bright for five days. GUP didn’t see me on any of them. I treated myself to a half-term holiday. I opened old Mrs Fisherton’s bedroom window as wide as the sash would go and the bright fresh air rushed in. Another welcome visitor who rushed in was the tortoiseshell cat. I don’t know if she belonged to someone or if her owner had moved and she had come back to her old home as cats do or if she was just a stray. But she seemed well-fed and when I found her curled up on my bed and stroked her she felt sleek and plump. By that time I had taken great strides in household management and was able to cook myself elaborate dishes like beans on toast and boiled eggs and pasta out of a packet. That evening I was going to have sardines but I gave them to the cat and had tinned spaghetti myself. Those sardines did the trick and she was mine. She went out every day and sometimes stayed out a long while but I left the window open for her, even when it got bitterly cold again, and she always came back. I called her Mabel after my ghostly hostess.

  By then I had broken two rules of living at old Mrs Fisherton’s, the no-smoking rule and the no-pets one. Nobody had told me pets weren’t allowed. It was something you took for granted with Max and Selina, just as you assumed there’d be a no-leaving-windows-open rule, no sub-letting, no lovers and no one visiting after ten p.m. On my birthday Selina invited me to lunch. Or, rather, she invited me for a birthday lunch two days later, on the Saturday. She and Max naturally believed I had my nose to the grindstone at GUP on weekdays.

  I had none of the sort of clothes you wear for parties. I wore jeans all the time, I still do, though they’re designer jeans now and washed each time they’re worn. My husband doesn’t notice what I wear. He once said he no longer noticed what I looked like and I took it for a compliment. Washing had been a problem at old Mrs Fisherton’s. I didn’t know about launderettes, you don’t if you live in the country. It was Beryl who told me there was one in Clifton Road and another in the Harrow Road. But that useful tip was in the future and I was still washing things by hand and hanging them over the kitchen sink or the bath. So the jeans I wore to have lunch with Max and Selina had been worn at least four times since I last washed them and my sweatshirt (red with GUP on it in black letters) was clean but creased. Old Mrs Fisherton’s iron flashed and fizzled when I tried to use it and I didn’t know about electricity in those days.

  That there would just be the three of us was what I had expected. Instead I found a full-scale luncheon party with drinks first in the yellow and emerald drawing room. Selina looked me up and down reflectively but said nothing. She was wearing a very short pink dress with a little flared skirt, pink shoes and the pearls. In the drawing room there was champagne already poured into the right sort of glasses on a tray and fizzy water or orange juice for those who preferred it and a great deal of the sort of food I’ve always disliked, bits of things on little squares of bread or toast or pastry. As I took a glass of champagne I tried to understand why they were doing all this for me, I had scarcely seen them since before Christmas, and now suddenly they were putting on a full-blown party for my birthday. Later on I got used to this pattern of behaviour, a kind of hard-soft technique, hot-cold or hawks and doves, and now I think the explanation is simple. They didn’t want me, they didn’t much like me and perhaps they regretted their generosity in letting me have the flat. Those were their hawkish times. And then their consciences would trouble them, they became doveish and ‘made it up’ to me in disproportionate gestures like this party.

  I knew no one there, though I recognized the Silvermans. He wasn’t wearing shorts this time but a thick tweed suit. When Selina introduced me I thought about what Beryl had said and wondered if the boy called Silver had hastily got rid of his friends for the weekend. Mrs Silverman looked at me the way I’ve noticed parents of the young look at other young. It’s a wary look, an assessing look, distrustful and expecting the worst. If you met their young, wou
ld you have a bad influence on them, making them even worse than they already are? Maybe you’re dealing drugs. Maybe you drink, do cocaine, drop out, vandalize phone boxes, write on walls, live in even worse squalor than they do. Make up your mind, they seem to be saying to themselves, to keep them away from yours at all costs. All that was in Mrs Silverman’s look and her smile. Her handshake wasn’t very enthusiastic either.

  Her husband was nice. He wished me a happy birthday and even said he hoped I’d meet their son. I ought to meet some young people, not all this lot, he said, waving his hand at a man Selina said was a television producer, her producer, and a Wanda Something who had a restaurant in the King’s Road. The producer was all smiles and jollity. A life-and-soul-of-the-party man. Like the rest of them, once he had kissed Selina, he started telling her how wonderful she had been in recent episodes of Streetwise, she was more famous than a film star. Selina simpered and smiled and said it was marvellous for an artist to be appreciated, it made everything worthwhile.

  ‘I daresay the dosh isn’t bad either,’ said Jack Silverman.

  ‘You said your son was coming,’ replied Selina, showing her claws, ‘but I suppose one word from you and he does as he likes.’

  ‘We haven’t seen him.’ Erica Silverman sounded unhappy about it. ‘The place was deserted when we got here on Friday night and the top flat an absolute tip. I sometimes wonder what we pay Beryl for.’

  This, I felt, was most unfair. Beryl had often told me how willing she was to clean the top flat. It was ‘the son’, the missing Silver, who wouldn’t let her in. Selina drew me away and introduced me to a woman who said she was ‘just a housewife’, an actor who’d been a ‘guest star’ on some of the Streetwise episodes, and a woman who designed and made cushions. I didn’t catch their names. These last were more my sort of age, she said, lamenting the non-arrival of ‘the Silverman boy’. The actor referred to Selina as my aunt and went on doing it after I had corrected him. The cushion designer wanted to know if I had ‘ambitions to follow in her footsteps’. I said I hadn’t. I was going to be a steeplejack. It was a stupid thing to say, I should have known better, but these people induced a rebelliousness in me and I became reckless.