“I think you’ll get on well with Bill Harvey—your temporary landlord, you know, the guy whose house you’re going to live in until you find your feet and get a place of your own. An interesting bloke. Used to be a jockey, and then a flyweight boxer, and still has the broken nose to prove it. A bit like dueling scars in his circle, having a broken nose. I remember he once told me that when he was a kid the big man in his personal world was the landlord, whose agent kept coming around to dun his mother for the rent, so he decided one day he was going to be a landlord himself, and now he owns houses all over South London—Catford, Lee Green, New Cross, Peckham… He prides himself on being a good landlord; he swears he never hires anyone to do anything he can’t do himself, from painting and rewiring down to drains and concrete floors.”
Was he going to have to go on and talk about Bill’s one visible shortcoming? Gorse’s head was nodding and her eyelids kept drifting down, but—thank goodness—they were now rounding the corner of the street where Bill lived. Godwin thrust a fiver at the cabby and told him to keep the change, and just as he opened the door Bill appeared to lend him a hand.
“She looks as if she’s being called already!” he whispered as he caught the drowsy girl under the arms with all the expertise due to helping fellow boxers away from the ring after a catastrophic defeat.
“Yes, I think so. Better get her inside as fast as possible,” Godwin answered.
But Gorse was able to stand and walk by herself as she was led into the house, even though she kept casting glances to either side, for this was a decaying street, down on its luck, and the frontages and roofs were even more in need of repair than those where Godwin lived, while the curbs were lined with abandoned cars, some of which had been set on fire and burned to discolored metal skeletons.
“I have to live here?” she said in faint horror.
“You won’t find a better ‘ouse in London that takes in lodgers on the spur of the moment,” Bill declared. “Not since the Rent Acts you won’t!”
He was a remarkable figure, and people were looking at him from across the street as hard as Gorse was staring at his disreputable-seeming home, with its unpainted woodwork and rusty guttering, all in accordance with his ingrained principle that one should do nothing to attract the attention of the tax collectors. He affected clothing that two or three generations ago would have been considered flash: a brown check suit with brilliantly polished brown boots, a yellow shirt, a green silk tie with a pearl sticker in it, and—even for this brief excursion into the open air—the same brown bowler hat he would have worn on a trip to Epsom for the Derby.
“All the gear you’re getting from Hugo & Diana is being sent here,” Godwin improvised. “And remember, this is only temporary—and of course once you’re settled in, you’ll find it’s much nicer than it looks from the outside. Remember how you felt about my place!”
Had she not been so sleepy by now, though, it was plain she would have resisted their attempts to steer her along the hallway and into a room on the right. From the rear of the house came faint noises: a running commentary on a horse race, growing momently more frenzied.
“I picked Shahanshah yesterday at twenty to one—did you ‘ave anything on ‘im?” Bill inquired as he opened the door of the room so that Godwin could steer Gorse through it. By now she was again stumbling with her eyes shut, fighting and failing to stay awake. The room had been repapered with a hideous design of huge orange and pink roses on a sky-blue ground, but otherwise it was precisely as Godwin remembered: the narrow bed, the second-hand armchair, the rickety table and upright chair, the curtained alcove in the corner for hanging clothes, the chest of drawers with a mismatched handle on the left of the bottom drawer, the washbasin with the exposed plumbing, the electric shower in a tin cabinet with a torn plastic curtain across the front, even the battered tin wastebasket with a design of daffodils.
Of course, it wasn’t yet activated. It would take a while for Gorse to learn how to do that, but she would. And then it might well be quite some time before she decided to move elsewhere.
They laid her on the bed and within seconds she had rolled on one side and begun to utter that trace of a snore which Godwin had rebuked her for: a tiny bubbling sound on every intake of breath, and a pop-and-wheeze on every exhalation. Nervously Bill said, “I think we better get out of ‘ere and shut the door, don’t you?”
“Yes. She’s very close. I wouldn’t put it more than half an hour away.”
They retreated to the hallway, where Bill retrieved a tankard half full of bitter which he had left on an occasional table. Raising it significantly, he said, “Want to pop in the parlor for a minute, sink a jar? I missed the end of the race but I can rerun it. After that I got a terrific cup-tie—everybody said Rovers ‘ad it made, but I said United and I was right! Even though that was before I got my new amulet. You know what an amulet is? Truly? Ah, might’ve known you’d ‘ave ‘eard of ‘em before. Smart aleck! Puts all my other gear in the shade, though. Swear it does!”
He made an all-encompassing gesture. On the occasional table stood a vase; it contained white heather. Over the front door a horseshoe was nailed, open end down; Godwin recalled what agonies Bill had been through, wondering which view was correct—whether if it were upside down all the luck would run out, or whether it should be mounted so that luck would fall on those who passed beneath. The latter had prevailed, but he had one the other way up at the back door, just in case. It was his conviction that charms and cantrips had brought him his good fortune, and he had made his home into a kind of museum of superstitions.
Wearily and not without malice Godwin said, “Did you have anything on Shahanshah?”
“Me? Not bleedin’ likely! Won’t let me in the bettin’ shop any more, the buggers won’t! Won’t let me do the pools neither! Just ‘cause all the time I’m right an’ they’re wrong! But you’re ‘avin’ me on, aren’t you? I could swear I told you what they done to me down the bettin’ shop!”
“Maybe you ought to turn in your amulets and try your luck all by yourself for a change,” Godwin suggested dryly.
“Thought of that,” Bill answered with a lugubrious scowl. “But the way I look at it, you’re better off bein’ lucky than unlucky, right?”
“Right.”
“Sure you won’t stop off for a jar?” Bill went on, having drained his tankard. “I got the place done over real nice now. You couldn’t tell it from Frinton-on-Sea, I’d take my oath on that. And I got barrels and barrels of beer—lager, bitter, stout, whatever you fancy!”
Godwin was spared the need to refuse by a sudden racket emanating from Gorse’s room: great clumsy stamping sounds, then the noise of something being knocked over—probably the chair—and curses in a deep, unfeminine voice.
“Either come on in, or scarper toot sweet!” Bill whispered. “I never fancy meetin’ any of me lodgers when they’re—well, you know!”
Nodding, Godwin repressed a shudder. Indeed, it must be eerie to meet a stranger in a familiar body.
Something tinny: the wastebasket being kicked or hurled at the wall.
“Gawblimey, I’ll ‘ave to paper the room again… Well?”
“I’m going to scarper. Sorry. Next time with luck. You fix the luck, okay?”
“Okay.”
But it was a sickly grin he gave Godwin as he shook hands and he couldn’t refrain from glancing at the door of the room to see whether it was bulging yet under an attack from the other side. Often it took quite some while for the owner to get adjusted.
“Funny…” Bill said as he turned away. He spoke in a musing tone. “Sometimes I’d give anything… You been called lately, ‘ave you?”
“What do you think I’m doing here?” And, impelled by the same need which had caused him to speak up at Irma’s, and knowing what he had to say would register on Bill if anyone, he suddenly produced from his pocket the press cutting which included him in a list of heroes decorated at Buckingham Palace. “I got the George Medal fo
r it,” he muttered. “See?”
“Crikey!” Bill said, his eyes widening. “The George Medal, eh? Wish I ‘ad ‘arf your imagination! I thought I was pitchin’ it a bit strong when I backed Lovely Cottage for the National!”
He studied the press cutting avidly. But before he could make a further comment, they were interrupted by a real crash from Gorse’s room: probably the hand-basin shattering. Godwin hastily retrieved the slip of paper and made for the door.
“See yourself out!” Bill invited ironically, and turned back to the kitchen. Struck by a thought, however, he checked.
“Show me that again!”
“Uh… Well, if you like.” Godwin complied, feeling for some unaccountable reason extremely nervous—not because of the renewed noises from the room, but because there was a frown on Bill’s usually cheerful face.
“September the twentieth,” Bill said at last, tapping the paper with a blunt forefinger.
“Yes!”
“1940?”
“Yes, of course—during the Blitz!”
“I don’t believe it,” Bill said with finality, surrendering the paper again.
“Nobody’s asking you to!” Godwin snapped, returning it to his pocket. But a sour taste was gathering in his mouth, and he forced himself to add the crucial question: “Why?”
“Weren’t no George Medals then, nor George Cross neither. Didn’t get introduced until September the twenty-third.” Bill gave a crooked smile. “I don’t waste all me time watchin’ football on the telly. Always bin interested in the war. An’ that I remember clear as daylight. September the twenty-third just ‘appens to be me birthday… Lord, there she goes again! ‘Ave that door down in a minute! Better scarper—see yer!”
A moment later Godwin was back in the dingy street under a dismal sky. People seemed to be looking at him more than even they had at Bill in his out-of-date finery. Their faces were cold and pinched with hunger. Some of the children playing in the gutter wore only ragged vests or outgrown dresses and were mechanically masturbating as they gazed at him with dull eyes.
Godwin shivered and hurried on by, pulling up the collar of his jacket against those stony, chilly stares.
But at least he could now look back on a job complete, and before claiming his reward he could afford to relax and unwind for a while. Starting today? Starting tomorrow?
There was no hurry. Sometimes there was, as though pressure were being applied, but not at present. He had time to think over what he wanted next.
And needed it. What Bill had said had disturbed him. He felt as though the foundation of his existence had been shaken, as by earthquakes.
There was only one tenable explanation. Birthday or no birthday, Bill must have made a mistake.
It was inconceivable that the owners should.
Abruptly, as he was heading away from Bill’s place, it dawned on Godwin that he was within easy walking distance of Harry Fenton’s. On the spur of the moment he decided to go there and pick up a passport; he had used his present one twice.
But when he arrived at Harry’s basement flat, in a narrow street of sleazy gray-brick houses beset—like the whole of London—with abandoned cars, there was no reply to his ring… this being one of the few doors which did not automatically open even to his touch.
The most likely explanation was that Harry had been called, and for that there was no help. There was never any help.
Perhaps it didn’t matter. Harry’s forgeries were—naturally—the finest in the world, and Godwin had not actually been warned that he shouldn’t use a passport too often; it just seemed like a reasonable precaution, because there were so many countries where the police were forever demanding “Vos papiers!” and “Ihr Ausweis!”—or whatever—and the presence of a visitor unrecorded at any port or airport might entrain problems…
But what the hell? Shrugging, though unable to repress a scowl of annoyance, Godwin resigned himself to using the old one. He badly needed clean air and an absence of people, so there was no alternative.
As he trudged toward the nearest street where a cruising taxi could logically be intersecting with him, because it was impolitic to work even minor miracles except in carefully chosen company, his attention was caught by a little girl on the other side of the road, shaking back her fair hair. He checked in mid-stride, staring… and realized she could not possibly be anybody other than herself.
Thinking he might catch the last of the skiing, he made for André Bankowski’s hotel at Les Hôpitaux Neufs, but even though the spring was dismal over Western Europe, the snow was already melting except on the very highest pistes, and the only good run he achieved was spoiled because he spotted a blond girl riding up in the téléférique with André while he was on the last stretch, and didn’t realize until he had wandered off the line into soft crust less snow that she was too round-faced and had too large a mouth.
Compared with whose?
He sat through one boring evening in the bar and watched people getting drunk and amorous, and went to New Orleans instead, where English-born Wilfred Burgess was fulfilling his ambitions by leading a band of half-legendary jazzmen, one of whom claimed to have recorded with King Oliver. But on the corner of Bourbon and Iberville in the Vieux Carré he saw a fair-haired girl making a grand performance, for the benefit of a boyfriend, out of her attempts to eat an enormous oyster po’boy one-handed with a full but open can of beer in the other, and found himself on the point of going to her assistance before he realized she was not in fact the person he imagined.
And who was that?
Dispirited, he went to Maud McConley’s in Nassau for some skin-diving, and while darting around coral reefs and enjoying his isolation and his suspension in time as well as space noticed a head of long, pale hair spread out in the water and his heart nearly stopped before he worked out that the change of color due to being under water meant that this was not the shade he had in mind.
What shade?
Alone in his magnificent hotel suite, masturbating with desultory lack of interest, he thought the matter through and felt cheated, deceived, betrayed.
That little girl whose life he so vividly remembered saving (and to hell with Bill Harvey!): she was the key and clue. Blasé, he had grown immune to most erotic stimuli; it was the readiest form of reward someone in his position could request. But her brief kiss, so public and so shameless…
Merely recalling it made him climax, and the pang of that was promptly followed by disgust. He kept thinking of a single word: pervert.
And went back to England to find a cloudy, hesitant summer as ill-defined as his own state of mind. He half wished he might be called again, but he had not yet claimed his reward for the last time, and so far he had not thought of anything fresh he wanted to experience.
Besides, the occasions for being called were apparently growing fewer. Maybe people were going out of style.
Or whatever.
Needing to kill time, he thought about reclaiming the Urraco from the Park Lane underground car-park and revisiting some places he had liked in the old days—out in Kent, for example, where around Canterbury there were country pubs he recalled with vague nostalgia. Maybe that was worth doing; maybe it wasn’t. He found himself half envying Irma for her pride at being constantly involved with the jet set, and even Bill, whose obsession with winning meant that he could get as excited over a videotape of the Cup Final as over the match itself in real time. But he himself had chosen to be a man of leisure. As the saying went, it had seemed like a good idea at the time…
Well, as the other saying went, having made his bed he had to lie in it.
But it would certainly help if he learned to lie more convincingly. Especially to himself.
The city, though, seemed even less endurable than usual, with its hordes of child-beggars that he had to scatter with handfuls of change flung as far out into the roadway as he could manage. The technique always worked, because as soon as a fight broke out over who was to have the pound pieces, t
heir attention magically switched, but it was still a damnable nuisance, and he was glad to see that the police were now patrolling in threes, one being a radio operator, so that trouble could be nipped in the bud. Moreover, there seemed to be a lot more of them than in the past.
But it was a shame there was so little traffic now. It might have run some of the greedy devils over.
After only a short while, therefore, he decided to collect the car and give himself a pleasanter impression of his homeland.
Part of Knightsbridge was closed; a neglected building had slumped into the road and enforced a detour, and the police had put up anti-looter barricades. Growing angrier by the minute, Godwin found himself constrained to walk to Marble Arch and approach by the northern end of Park Lane, where there had recently been a couple of bombings. The car-park, reportedly, was intact, but while of course even if it had not been he could have obtained another car without trouble, it would have been a nuisance, and nuisances were what he was least in the mood for.
The Global Hotel, at any rate, had escaped the bombers, and the commissionaire, Jackson, to whom he had been so generous in the recent past was on duty and chatting with a woman of about fifty, slender, wearing a bulky but lightweight black coat and black corduroy pants. Spotting Godwin just as he was about to cross the road and enter the car-park, he offered a salute and the woman beside him glanced around and time stopped.
It’s impossible!
It’s insane!
But if that little one whom I recall as Greer had lived to—
The thought snapped off like a dry branch. It was not palatable to think about the passage of time. He and his kind were outside it. When they needed repairs they were serviced more efficiently than a car could be. Time was not of their essence.
PLAYERS AT THE GAME OF PEOPLE by John Brunner Page 8
