The Bevin Estate was a thirty-minute walk from the Churchill Gardens. It had once featured on a Channel 4 documentary as a classic example of sixties inner-city planning gone wrong. Everywhere else in the country they were tearing down tenement blocks like his and replacing them with ‘social housing’. Someone had obviously forgotten the Bevin. Fifteen concrete high-rise monoliths glowered over the leafy suburbs of South London like the ugly second cousin that you try to avoid at family parties, but who followed you around silently with that sad look on their face.
He toyed with the idea of going straight over to Eddy’s shop and getting rid of the medal, but it was too close to dinner time and Josh had to make sure his mother ate.
Over the years his mother had slowly become a creature of habit. Everything had its place and meals were served at the same time every day. Multiple sclerosis was an unpredictable disease; her diet, and her medication had to be strictly regulated. Through years of trial and error, they had found a routine that had given her some sense of normality. But every so often, for no apparent reason, her MS would flare up, and he would spend weeks stuck in the flat nursing her back to something approaching normal.
He’d been doing this since he was twelve. His teenage years had been nothing like the others’ in his class. While they all had mountain bikes, Xboxes, iPhones and laptops, he had an agoraphobic mother who hadn’t left the flat in the last five years, and a list of debts as long as the opening credits in Star Wars.
What he’d discovered during these monotonous weeks of caring was a love of cars, or, more accurately, speed. His only release from the self-imposed prison sentence of his mother’s condition were the midnight joyrides around the empty streets of his town. Josh found he had a knack for getting into other people’s cars. There was something about his touch that short-circuited their alarm systems, and allowed him to override the ignition. He drove them fast so that the world became a stream of light beyond the window. For a few wonderful minutes, there was no past, no future, just the now.
Josh stopped at Malik’s corner shop to get something for dinner and some Rizlas for his mum. He checked the time: it was 5.30pm. The news channel was playing on an old TV that Malik had wedged into a shelf behind the counter. Footage of fireworks going off over Berlin were overlaid by a ticker tape feed running across the bottom stating:
GERMANY CELEBRATES 15 YEARS SINCE REUNIFICATION.
Josh read the words quietly under his breath. It was the way he had taught himself to conquer the dyslexia, to stop the letters from jumping around.
‘Hey, Malik. What’s with the party?’ he said, nodding at the TV.
‘Oh that,’ Malik said nonchalantly, looking up from his paper, ‘anniversary of the Brandenburg gate, or the Berlin Wall, or something like that. You know, back in the nineties when East Germany rejoined with West.’
Josh had no idea what Malik was talking about, and he was too tired to ask any more questions.
‘Settle up tomorrow. OK?’ Josh said as he took the shopping.
‘Yeah, no probs,’ said Malik, going back to his crossword. ‘Say hello to your mum.’
5
The Flat
His mum was in the front room as usual; he could hear the sounds of her favourite TV show and caught the scent of the joint she was smoking as soon as he closed the front door.
Cannabis was one of the best remedies for her spasms. She used to be able to restrict her ‘medicine’ to those times when she was feeling rough, but he had noticed that recently she was smoking every day.
Initially Josh had tried to persuade her to eat rather than smoke the dope, but she was addicted to the nicotine as well, and he couldn’t face trying to force her to kick that habit at the same time.
‘Hi, love,’ she shouted from the other room, ‘had a good day?’
‘Yeah, Mum. Just putting your dinner on,’ he called back as he unpacked the shopping: two pieces of white fish in a boil-in-the-bag sauce — it was hardly a feast, but it was easy, and he was too tired to do anything fancy.
As the pan of water began to bubble, he took the medal carefully out of his pocket. It was cross-shaped, with oak leaves where the ribbon connected. At the centre was a Nazi symbol encircled by letters in a language he couldn’t make out — except for the name ‘Stauffenberg’. It was a name he had a feeling he should know, but the reason escaped him.
As he held it in the palm of his hand, glowing lines began to rise from its surface. Concerned that he might trigger another flashback, he folded it into a piece of newspaper and hid it under some tea towels in a kitchen drawer. He knew it would be safe in there; his mother hadn’t been in the kitchen in years, let alone attempted to help with any washing up.
The name of the German officer was annoying him. The answer was flickering just outside his reach, like a fly buzzing around the back of his head. He would have to ask Mrs B. tomorrow. She lived next door and was the oldest person he knew — she was always banging on about the war. Her surname was Bateman but everyone called her Mrs B. She’d been friends with his mother for what felt like forever, and would sometimes look after her when Josh couldn’t. The lady was ancient, her skin so thin that it had a kind of translucent quality, but she still had all her marbles and an uncanny knack for seeing through every lie Josh had ever told her.
‘How’s Mrs Davies?’ his mother asked as Josh placed the tray of steaming white fish onto her lap. This was not the first time she had forgotten about Mrs Davies.
‘She’s gone, Mum. Left after her husband ran off with that woman from 21A.’
‘Tart. She was always after him,’ she muttered as she dug around under her leg for the remote control.
Josh laughed at the joke again, but he made a mental note to check his diary later. She usually had memory issues just before a flare up, which was the last thing he needed right now.
They ate together in silence, watching some pointless game show. Josh watched her more than the screen — he loved the way she would snort at all of the lame jokes or shout the answer before the contestant. His mum had watched so many of these programmes that she had become something of an expert on unusual and random facts.
‘Did you know that the moon is the second densest object in the solar system?’
‘No, Mum. I thought it was made of cheese.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Joshua. That Brian Cox is a very clever man. It’s fascinating, astrology and all that.’
‘Astronomy,’ he corrected her.
‘Yeah, that too.’ Her concentration lapsed as her eyes returned to the TV screen.
She had told him once that she was studying at university when she had fallen pregnant, but he couldn’t remember what subjects she was taking. They never spoke about who was the father. It was a forbidden subject, but Josh knew that she had dropped out and never finished her degree. There were moments when her mind cleared, and he saw the fierce intelligence still burning behind her eyes, but it was buried deep and was surfacing less and less.
‘Your friend Lenny came round again today,’ she said as she swept up the final remnants of cod and parsley sauce with her fork. She had eaten it all without looking down once, her eyes permanently fixed on the TV screen. Josh never failed to be amazed how she could do that — it was like a superpower — she just seemed to know instinctively where the food was.
‘He’s a funny bugger. Always acting like he’s the big man. I remember when he filled his wellies with wee in reception.’
Josh had to bite his lip. Only his mother would have the balls to bring up that particular incident. Lenin’s family had been very poor when he was younger and used to send him to primary school in wellies and on one particular occasion he couldn’t be bothered to ask to go to the toilet and simply pissed down his leg into his boots. Josh could still hear the sound of the squelching as he was marched out of the class.
‘Did he say what he wanted?’ he asked, trying to sound disinterested, even though the fact that Lenin had turned up at his flat w
as a serious issue: a personal house call was unheard of. It was usually one of his minions, all of whom Josh knew well and could handle without much of a problem, but for Lenin to come himself and to have him talk to his mum — that was basically like saying, ‘You’re in deep shit sunshine!’
‘Oh, the usual nonsense. Something about you borrowing something that he needs back by tomorrow. He was quite nasty about it. The sooner we get out of this dump and find you some better friends the better. He’s not good for you.’
‘One day, Mum,’ he said as he lifted the tray off her lap.
‘Maybe my numbers will come up this week?’ she said, holding up the tattered old lottery ticket that spent most of its life down the side of her chair. ‘Then we can get that house with a garden, and you can go back to college, like I promised.’
She was looking directly at him — her hand stroked his face. ‘You deserve a better life than this, Joshua.’ There were tears welling in her eyes.
‘This time next week, Mum. Yeah?’ He gave her one of his reassuring smiles and took her tray back to the kitchen.
‘Yeah,’ she echoed as her attention returned to her programme. ‘Did you get me some Rizzies?’
‘In your pot on the coffee table,’ he shouted as he dropped their plates into a sink of greasy, lukewarm water. The gas had been cut off two weeks ago and he had to boil the kettle to wash up. He checked the electricity meter. It was running low and in a couple of days they would be out of credit — which was bad news as it was another two weeks until her next disability cheque. He was going to have to sort something out — something that would get them through the winter.
He went into his bedroom and closed the door. It was just thick enough to block out the blare of the game show. The room hadn’t been redecorated since she’d got sick. Old posters of rally cars and Formula 1 trading cards were holding back the peeling wallpaper with drawing pins. There was hardly any furniture apart from a bed and you couldn’t see the carpet for his clothes that lay scattered across the floor, as if someone had detonated a sack full of charity-shop rejects. Next to the bed was a very badly assembled cabinet that he had rescued from a skip, it was barely holding together, and he knew how it felt.
Josh had never really been one to think about the future; he could just about manage to make it through the next twenty-four hours: ‘Makes more sense to live in the present tense.’ He knew that it couldn’t go on much longer, that there would have to be some big changes soon. Mum wasn’t getting any better and the frequency of her relapses was increasing.
He sat down on his bed and took out his journal from under the pillow. It had been his faithful companion during the long nights of watching over her, his only record of the nightmare that had been the last five years. Now held together with Sellotape and football stickers, he had kept track of every one of her episodes — documenting every day, every symptom, every drug until she recovered — he knew her condition better than any doctor.
As Josh flicked back through the pages, he realised that his handwriting had changed little since he had started all those years ago. To anybody else, it would look like the scrapbook of an eight-year-old, but he understood every misspelling, every reversed character — it was like his own secret language.
A Polaroid fell out from between the pages. It was an old photograph of the two of them on a beach. His mother looked so young and so well in the faded image. His younger-self was beaming as he held up an ice cream that was nearly as big as his face. There were hazy, fragmented memories of that day, it was Brighton or Bournemouth, somewhere with a beach, on one of those long hot summer days that seemed to go on forever. It was his sixth birthday, and she had taken him on an adventure to the coast by train. He could still remember the moment he saw the sea, it was quite a revelation to a kid who had grown up in the city — a wide curving horizon of blue that stretched beyond the edges of his vision. It made him wonder how big the world really was, and from that day he was determined to see what was over the ‘edge of the world’.
Those were the days when he used to dream of being a pilot, of flying all over the world, the last few golden years of his childhood before his mother’s illness forced him to forget such fantasies.
He used to convince himself that his father had taken the Polaroid, that the mysterious man whom his mother refused to talk about was standing on the other side of the lens. He would imagine what it would be like to go back through the image and speak to him — ask him why he had left.
He put the photo on the cabinet and lay down on the bed. It had been a crazy, messed-up day. His arms ached from the chopping and his stomach was undecided about keeping the meal he had just eaten.
He closed his eyes and tried to relax, letting his mind wander. He called it ‘drifting’. It was a trick he had discovered back in the classroom when he got tired of trying to read the books they gave him. It was like having a TV inside his head; he found he could replay old memories like they were DVDs or just make up new ones. The teachers called it ‘daydreaming’ and usually sent him to the headmaster.
The memory of the Nazi officer resurfaced, and Josh allowed it to run back and forth, looking for clues as to what was going on. He focused his attention on the things that had fallen out of his briefcase, the strange wax packages, the wires and the timer. He switched his focus to the expression on the man’s face as he went into the stall. The man had looked guilty — as if he had been caught red-handed. The more he went over the scene, the more convinced Josh was that the contents of the suitcase had looked like the parts of a bomb.
His eyes snapped back open.
That made no sense, he thought to himself. There was no way he had gone back in time and met an actual Nazi officer. It was more likely the colonel had some kind of fetish cosplay going on in the basement and he had fallen through a trapdoor. There would be a rational explanation for what had happened. Although it still didn’t explain how he had lost all of his clothes.
The possibilities were beginning to make his head ache, so he tried to think about something else.
He would take the medal down to Eddy in the morning. It should be worth enough to keep Lenin happy and get the electric topped up for another couple of weeks, giving him some breathing space to focus on getting a regular job — although there weren’t many he could apply for with his police record.
He closed his eyes and let out a long, slow sigh. Something would come up, as Mrs B used to say.
6
No Telly Eddy
Eddy had one of those trustworthy faces: his brown eyes were large, doe-like and sat on either side of one of the biggest noses Josh had ever seen. His hair was receding over his head in direct contrast to the beard that was sprouting from his chin. These features tended to give someone the impression of a kindly old gentleman, which was the one thing he was not.
Josh had sold Eddy a few things over the years, mostly old stuff his gran had left him when she died, and every single time he had come away feeling cheated. Eddy had an innate ability to know the value of a thing and then offer you less than half of what it was worth.
To the casual bystander he was the manager of a launderette — one that had the appearance of being constantly busy without ever having any visible customers. Josh knew this was just a front for the real business that took place out back beyond the beaded curtain, where he ran a very successful trade in buying and selling second-hand goods.
He took them in any condition, although he especially liked to fix electrical appliances: vacuum cleaners, washing machines, toasters, but not TVs. He hated them with a passion and it had earned him the nickname ‘No-Telly-Eddy’.
Eddy was a great believer in the free market, which meant he was happy to buy and sell just about anything, no questions asked.
The chill of morning melted away as Josh walked into the warm, tumble-dried air. It was like stepping into another climate. The washing machines were all droning away, each full of the soapy items of someone else’s life — he wond
ered if anyone ever actually turned up to collect them or whether Eddy just washed the same things over and over again.
Eddy was sitting in his usual spot behind the counter, busily disassembling a hair dryer, the component parts of which were laid out in careful order on the desk in front of him. He didn’t look up but simply raised a finger to acknowledge Josh’s existence and command him to wait.
There was a large pair of spectacles balanced on the end of his nose, which enlarged his eyes even more as he peered over them into the heart of the motor. With the concentration of a master watchmaker he was carefully adjusting something with a long thin screwdriver.
‘These are always buggers to put back together,’ he muttered. ‘Bloody Chinese manufacturer uses cheap brushes in the motor — they wear out in days.’
There was another twist of the screwdriver and something wiry dropped out onto the counter. He looked up at Josh. ‘See what I mean? What can I do for you, Mr Jones?’
Josh had always admired Eddy’s style; — he spoke like an old-fashioned shopkeeper from Downton Abbey — even though Josh knew it was all an act. Eddy had grown up in London’s East End and had an evil temper when he didn’t get his own way. Some of his more naïve clients fell for it, which meant that they got ripped off even more than the regulars.
Josh pulled the medal from his jacket, still carefully wrapped in the newspaper. Eddy’s eyes narrowed as Josh unwrapped the precious object.
‘Let’s take this to my office, shall we?’ he whispered, glancing at the front door and closing Josh’s fingers back over the medal. The old man put his hand on Josh’s shoulder and guided him through the beaded curtain.
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 3
