It had been late, after four, when Maria had driven to East Ham Jewish Cemetery. But it had still been open. Maria didn’t tell the Jewish lady she saw on the path that she was going to pray to her messiah at Len’s grave. This woman, like all the Jews, still waited for their deliverer. Except that He’d come.
Maria put her hand in her coat pocket and felt for the stones that she’d brought from her garden at home. Len had never had much interest in the garden and had once even suggested that they concrete part of it over. But it had been his and she hoped that putting the pebbles she’d carefully selected on his grave would please him. Pebbles placed on a Jewish grave indicated that the dead had not been forgotten; they were calling cards.
As Maria bent down she saw that Len had two other stones. One had probably been placed by his cousin, Karl—an old man himself now, he was the only blood relative, apart from his parents, that Len had ever been able to find after the Holocaust. They’d loved each other in that intense way that those who are stuck with each other do. And then there was another stone which, as Maria began to pray, she saw had a piece of paper underneath it. Maybe that was from Karl? Maybe some private message to Len in Yiddish or German or Hebrew?
“Dear Lord Jesus Christ,” she murmured. “Please have mercy upon Leonard Blatt and …”
Aware of slipping into the Catholic prayers of her youth from time to time, she was entirely sincere, but she was distracted. She wanted to see what was on the piece of paper underneath the stone. Even if she couldn’t understand it, she still wanted to see it; Len had been her husband. She said “Amen” and automatically crossed herself. Then she bent down and took the piece of paper from underneath the stone. Something was printed on it but, because of the darkness of the evening and her own increasing long-sightedness, she had to dig in her bag to get her glasses before she could see it. It was in English and it said Not funny. And in spite of knowing what a common expression that was and how it could be used in any number of contexts, Maria’s first thought when she saw it, when her hands began to shake was, How does anyone know?
IX
His name had been Dave Delmonte and he’d started what he called a “fun pub” down on the Custom House/Canning Town border. Years before it had been an old dockers’ gaff, and after that it had lain derelict for years. Dave had bought it in the late seventies and when he renamed it Dave’s Fun Palace, Maria had gone down there to audition for a resident comedian spot.
The whole alternative-comedy thing had only been in its infancy then and so a lot of the young comedians, like Maria, were just gingerly feeling their way. They went from clubs, to pubs to strip joints—anywhere that would have them, testing the water.
Maria, so nervous she shook from head to foot, turned up for the comedian auditions on a gray day in January. Half of London’s comedy scene arrived with her and so she joined a queue that went outside the old pub and along the Victoria Dock Road. So many were on the dole then that even some folk who were not comedians had come along, chancing their arms. She remembered easily how terrible she’d felt; just trying to concentrate on remembering her material had completely filled her mind.
The first half hour was spent outside in the drizzle and so by the time Maria got inside the pub her hair was plastered down flat on the top of her head and her make-up had run. When she finally got into the wings of the tiny stage that she hoped might be hers in the near future, she looked out from behind the curtains. Some rough sorts plus Dave Delmonte were in the audience. He was fat, middle-aged, and he was pissed, knocking back pints of lager—he gave each act less than a minute. There were four people in front of her when she first saw Dave and he dismissed them all with the same, growled out words, Not funny!
The place had smelt of stale beer, of smoke-soaked curtains and carpets and of toilets that were only used by men. Maria had felt sick even before she’d started her set, but as she walked onto the stage, looking scraggy, misshapen, scruffy and unattractive, she began to feel acid rising up into her throat. It wasn’t easy looking straight at Dave Delmonte anyway, but when she heard him say, “Not exactly Bernard Manning, are you, love?” she just fell into a blind panic. Bernard Manning was old school, mother-in-law and Paki jokes! People who liked Bernard wouldn’t like her! But she’d only prepared one small set and so she had to do that because she didn’t have anything else. It had been about periods.
She heard Dave Delmonte mutter the word “lesbian” underneath his breath less than thirty seconds in. Then he waved his pint in the air and he said, Not funny! Not funny! Not funny!
As far as Maria could tell, no one else had had three not funnys. Only her. She must have been really not funny. Oh God. She’d only just started out, she was young, she was also, unknown to her at the time, pregnant. Maria threw up on the stage then and there in front of Dave Delmonte and to the sound of laughter from some of the auditionees behind. Dave snapped his fingers and two blokes with faces like smashed assholes came on and dragged her off. As she passed him, Dave said something about being “up the duff” and then he’d yelled again, Not funny! She’d run home immediately, alone and weeping.
Her confidence was so knocked that she almost gave up. And then there was the pregnancy. That time, when the pregnancy and everything that both preceded and superceded it was so intimately connected to her failure as a comedian, was far too painful to recall. It was why those two words on that little scrap of paper on Len’s grave hurt her so much and frightened her.
How she held back her tears and got back to her car, Maria would never know. She dropped the awful little paper and ground it into the mud with her foot and then she left. That was not her life—not any more.
* * *
Lee watched Maria cry. She knew where the cameras in the living room were and he saw her turn away from them. But he could still see her shoulders heaving and hear her sobs. She’d been to visit her husband’s grave and so she was bound to be upset. Neil hadn’t seen anything untoward happen at the cemetery. The viewing screen started to go on the blink and so Lee did what he always did and hit it. Normal service resumed immediately.
Working with a load of second-hand, ancient surveillance kit hadn’t been a problem when he’d first started the agency, but four years on, it got on his tits. He still couldn’t quite believe that he’d been stupid enough to go into business in the first year of the recession. He’d spent the first six months living on chocolate and fags and then when the work had started to come in, it had been all about serving writs and following gangsters’ girlfriends. On more than one occasion during that time, he’d wished he’d stayed on in the police. But they were making redundancies now and so that probably wouldn’t have been for the best.
Ever since he’d left school, Lee had been looked after by someone. First the army, then the police, with his missus doing the caring back home. When Denise left him and took baby Jodie away with her, he threw himself not only into his police work but also into the arms of booze, plus the codeine painkillers he’d found so comforting at that time. Only Vi Collins had ever known about that and that was just because they’d slept together at his place one night. She’d seen him neck a whole load of them as soon as he got up and she’d had a right old go about how easy it was to kill yourself on them, how they dissolved your liver, turned you into a junkie. He hadn’t listened. That hadn’t happened until Vi had turned up with a birdcage containing what had looked at first like a scraggy blackbird. “If you top yourself then this poor parrot or whatever it is’ll starve to death,” she’d said. Then she’d left without another word and Lee had found himself alone with the creature that he eventually named Chronus. The same handle as the god of time was a good one for a bird that, though young, looked as old as stone. But Lee had taken to him and had stopped the codeine that day. Chronus had done nothing wrong; he didn’t deserve to starve.
Maria Peters switched on her television and began to watch some sort of comedy show, but she didn’t laugh once during the whole course of the program.
Someone, Lee couldn’t remember who, had told him years ago that all comedians were miserable buggers. He wouldn’t have gone so far as to say that in relation to Maria himself, but she was certainly a worried woman. Whatever she was seeing and hearing when she went about her daily business was real to her. Lee just wished that he knew who or what, if anything, that was. Maria scratched the back of her head and the diamonds on her fingers sparkled into the camera. One worry she didn’t have was money. That he envied her.
Anti-terrorism laws had cost Lee Arnold dear. They’d come in in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center in America and then after the July 7 attacks on London, they had only got more stringent. Lee had worked out of Forest Gate police station at the end of Green Street all his coppering life and so, even before Mumtaz’s appearance, he’d known a lot of Muslims. Green Street was where Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Asians of all stripes went to create businesses, shop, pray and socialize. Suddenly people who had known their Muslim neighbors for years were looking at them with suspicion. The law itself, it seemed to Lee, was doing that too. Rounding up lads he knew, who were justifiably angry and upset, was not his thing and by 2007 he’d had enough.
Lee’s phone began to vibrate in his pocket. He took it out and answered it.
“Roy’s buggered off with that Scotsman from Walthamstow,” Rose Arnold said.
“Fitzy? I can’t go out after my idiot brother and that tosser,” Lee said. “I’m working.”
“I know, love,” his mum replied. “I’m just saying in case you see the stupid dollop on your travels.”
Roy was so like their dad it was almost painful. Harry Arnold had drowned his sorrows in booze, mixed with assholes, got violent. Lee had spent much of his young life looking for that stupid dollop in his travels. Usually, like Roy, he was in some boozer or other with a load of other losers. Sometimes he was in some gutter, thrashing around in his own piss.
Resisting the urge to tell his mother, yet again, to chuck Roy out, Lee said, “I will.”
“I’m off round Auntie Annie’s,” Rose said.
“Yeah, you do that,” Lee said. Auntie Annie was his mum’s older sister. They liked watching Coronation Street together. They could both remember when it had first started back in 1960. Roy had been two years old. “Have a good time.”
“I will.”
Suddenly something on the monitor made Lee lean forward and look hard at Maria Peters watching television. “Night, Mum,” he said, and cut the connection.
In Maria Peters’ living room something that wasn’t the television was catching her attention. It was in the corner to the left of the TV and, from what Lee could see of it, it appeared to be a shoebox.
The dream never featured Ahmed as a viable person. He was always dying on the ground, with her just waiting and waiting and waiting for his breathing to stop. The moon was silver and liquid-looking in the sky. Then she had his bloodied phone in her hand and she was calling the ambulance, all the time thinking about what she was going to tell Shazia, worrying about how Shazia was going to know what to feel. She began to cry. She’d started to cry when it had really happened. But even through her tears she’d still watched Ahmed’s attacker’s back as he ran away so quickly from the scene, the light just catching the silver trainers as he’d headed north toward Wanstead. Even in her dream, especially in her dream, she didn’t know whether she was crying because her husband had died or because her beautiful savior had run away. Who was he? Why had he done what he’d done? Why did he keep on coming back just to stare at her?
When Mumtaz eventually managed to wrestle herself out of the dream, Shazia was sitting beside her on her bed. The reading lamp was on, illuminating the girl’s pale, worried face.
“You were screaming,” Shazia said.
Mumtaz, still breathing heavily, put a hand on her chest and then said, “I’m sorry, Shazia.”
“Was it about Dad?”
She’d stopped calling him Abba while he’d still been alive. It had been a way for her to rebel against him.
“Did you dream about Dad dying again?”
Mumtaz didn’t want to tell her. She wanted to make up some innocuous horror that the girl would be able to just dismiss and then go back to sleep. But she couldn’t. There were far too many lies still floating on the air without that.
“Yes,” Mumtaz said simply.
Shazia put her arms around Mumtaz’s neck and hugged her. “It’s all over now, Amma, you must try not to think about it.”
“Bad things come sometimes in dreams.” Oh, she was such a loving girl! Such a contrast to the awful madam she’d been when Mumtaz had arrived! She hugged her back. So tightly!
“It must have been just … I don’t know!” Shazia said. “You were like covered with blood. There were two policemen with you and I wondered what had happened. I thought that maybe …”
Mumtaz hugged her still more tightly. “Sssh! Sssh!”
Holding hard onto each other so that their knuckles became white they sat in silence for a few moments. Only when Mumtaz began to feel her own panic subside did she gently relax her grip on her stepdaughter. Shazia reluctantly moved away a little and sat back and breathed out. Her face wasn’t so pale any more and she began to smile. “I thought for a moment that something terrible was happening to you,” she said.
“Just a dream,” Mumtaz said.
“Yes.”
Briefly Shazia hugged Mumtaz again and then, still with a smile on her face, she said, “But at least he really is dead, Amma.” She got up to leave and then she added, “He can’t do stuff to us any more, can he. Not even in dreams.”
“We can wake up, Shazia,” Mumtaz said.
The girl blew her a kiss and then she left the room, closing the door quietly behind her.
Maria Peters hadn’t moved for nearly an hour. The television banged away of its own accord, but she just kept on looking at that box in the corner. Lee wondered what, if anything, was in it. Had she been really distressed she would have cried out, maybe even asked him to talk to her over the phone, but she didn’t. Much as the box appeared to be holding her attention, she did not seem to be visibly distressed. But then why would she be? It was just a shoebox.
Then again it probably wasn’t. The thing with the ceramic cats apparently moving about of their own accord had only happened the previous night. Had this box moved from, perhaps, her wardrobe down to this corner by the telly? He’d have to check through the tapes and see what he could find. The house had been rammed full earlier on in the day for some sort of bloody exorcism or blessing or something. If he could catch her in the act of moving things around herself … It wasn’t that he believed she was doing so consciously; in reality Lee didn’t know what he believed or didn’t believe about Maria Peters. So far he’d seen nothing untoward. Only her—and her weird churchy mates.
Lee had a problem with religion and he knew it. Try as she might, Rose Arnold hadn’t been able to enforce the Anglican values that Lee and Roy received at Sunday school and at church, because no one at church had made any sense. They’d had a “traditional” vicar which meant that worship had been heavy on the fear of God and anti-abortion, and light on joy. When he grew up, Lee had left the church with the abiding impression that religion was all a load of malignant bollocks. How a sharp woman like Maria Peters could be taken in by it he couldn’t imagine, but then Mumtaz was no fool either and she was all head-scarfed up. He’d taken a risk employing her. Although the old Boleyn crew didn’t say anything, he knew they thought he was barmy, that it was weird. But even before she told him about how she was a widow with a child, he’d seen the need in her. Her eyes, if not her mouth, had begged him to give her a chance. Beyond having a big house and a kid at private school, he didn’t know what the state of her finances were exactly, although he could infer that they weren’t good. Her husband had been murdered by, as the police would have it, “a person or persons unknown” and so not only did she have her grief to deal with, she had the horror of t
hat experience to try and live around too. She’d been there when her husband had been stabbed—they’d been walking across Wanstead Flats together going to visit a doctor.
Mumtaz hadn’t told him that they’d been going to see a gynecologist. That had come out when the crime had been reported. They’d been two people, doing an ordinary thing, and one of them had been murdered.
Looking back at the screen, Lee noticed that Maria’s head had slumped forward. There was a faint buzzing sound, a snore like a light cat’s purr. Still looking at the box, she’d dropped off.
X
Early Sunday mornings were always busy in Maria Peters’ house. First Betty arrived, then the rather younger and prettier Rachel Cole. Then the slim man with graying blond hair, wearing a cheap brown suit, who Neil now knew as Pastor Paul Grint.
“We always go to church together every Sunday, it’s nice,” Maria had told Neil. “It also saves on petrol.” She didn’t mention the cardboard box that had apparently been taking up so much of her attention. Neil was surprised she had time to get upset or even go to church, given all the prayer meetings and blessings that seemed to go on at her house.
Betty, Rachel and Paul Grint all walked to Maria’s place so they could go in her car. Neil wondered whether they gave her petrol money. Not that the church was far away. Over at Hackney Wick, the Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire was in an old industrial unit on Roach Road. Prior to becoming a church, it had been first a bathroom factory and then a tire warehouse. In order to allow more access to the Olympic site, it was up for demolition sometime during the coming months.
Neil had never been to the church before but found it hard to imagine these lower-middle-class white people in such a place. Churches with hellfire names in old factories and wholesale outlets were usually the preserve of African Christians. They all had names like The Tabernacle of the New Life, or The Holy Church of the End of Days. Generally focusing on the Book of Revelation and the end of the world, the so-called Rapture, there was usually a lot of shouting, of “testifying” and a great many people just talking gibberish, which they called “speaking in tongues.” That was something to do with being inhabited by the Holy Spirit. To Neil, an atheist, it all sounded a bit like something out of The Exorcist.
A Private Business Page 9
