He didn’t throw things or slam doors. He didn’t cry. He didn’t let himself down. The only person he yelled at was Bronwen because in stories like this it’s never the perpetrators who seem loathsome, only the enablers who haven’t, poor things, had even so much as a nibble of the forbidden fruit.
The two women moved to Lisbon. Bronwen became a highly successful dealer in pre-Isabelline Iberian ceramics. Mark told people she’d picked up all she knew from him, but when he was being honest with himself (which he usually was – it’s what made him so quick and flexible as a businessman) he knew how much she’d taught him too. The gallery was much better run thanks to her systems. Izza became, in sequence, a junkie, a psychotherapist, a condessa, and then, to everyone’s surprise, a nun.
Time passed. Love, and its attendant jealousies and resentments, dwindled to a manageable size.
Mark and Tristan met in Kensington Gardens. They hadn’t seen each other for nearly a decade. Although there was a fifteen-year age gap between them they had arrived simultaneously at an appreciation of the pleasures of middle age: gardening, Schubert, dogs. Mark had a rough-haired Pointer (female), Tristan an Airedale (male).
The dogs sniffed each other’s backsides and at once they were deeply, ecstatically, helplessly in love. Their human companions stood watching them while they twirled and pounded the earth, celebrating the wonder that was the other, and the miraculous good fortune that had brought them together. The pointer performed clumsy earth-bound pirouettes. The terrier leapt up and down on the spot, yapping.
‘Is this what it was like for Bronwen, do you suppose?’ asked Tristan.
‘Watching the two of us, you mean?’
‘Being driven crazy by her. Yes.’
‘So,’ said Mark. ‘You’re suggesting that Bronwen stood in relation to Isolde as you and I do to Biscuit and … what’s yours called?’
‘Willesden.’
‘Good name. That’s where you live?’
‘Yes.’
‘With?’
‘You’re asking am I available?’
‘Dearest Tristan, no. No. I’m not. I’m not asking that. I’m a married man.’
‘Yeah. I was at the wedding, remember. I handed you the rings.’
‘And very lovely you looked. How could I forget? But no. Not that marriage. He’s called Brian. You?’
‘The love potion worked for me. No one else has come close. I think about her every day. I was with someone for a while. Guess what. She was called Izza, short for Isabella. Not exactly moving on.’
‘Another woman?’
‘Yes. That stuck too.’
‘Why did you let her go, then?’
Tristan looked out over the Round Pond. It was a late afternoon in September. The light was piercingly beautiful, silver-gilt and icy clear and loaded with the melancholy of summer’s passing and the irrecoverability of lost time. The dogs were now performing a pas de deux which involved Willesden’s lying flat to the ground, barking, while Biscuit made repeated lunge-and-retreat moves. ‘Shall we walk?’ he said.
And so they walked and they talked and by the time they had passed under the bridge into Hyde Park, and called the dogs off when they tried to steal bread-crusts from a Japanese family who were feeding the ducks, and scoffed at the Diana fountain, and remembered the time they got locked into the park after an opening at the Serpentine Gallery and took off all their clothes and swam together, and kissed very carefully because they really really hadn’t wanted to swallow any of that soupy brown water, they were fond friends again.
‘What happened?’ said Mark. ‘Why haven’t we seen each other all these years?’
‘Because I adored you and you dumped me. Because you’re a heartless bastard. And because then I betrayed you,’ said Tristan, but he wasn’t very interested in that question. Instead he reverted to the earlier one. He said, ‘I think part of the reason I didn’t go after her was that she didn’t ask me to. But I can see now that was absurd. I was supposed to be the wooer. I wasn’t very confident back then. But also … She wasn’t the kind of person you could run off with. Insubstantial. Do you remember telling me off for making her up?’
‘No. What did I mean by that?’
‘You’ve forgotten all about me, haven’t you?’ Now Tristan sounded really hurt. ‘It was a thing we did. I’d tell you silly stories about the people we met. It was fun. We didn’t really have that much to talk about so … Well. It was a private thing we had.’
Mark said, ‘And so?’
‘I still do it,’ said Tristan. ‘I teach. All the kids love stories.’
‘Great. But …’
‘What I mean is you were right. We both made her up. You more than me. You invented a woman you could marry. And I invented one who could whisk me up to heaven. You said she was real, but that wasn’t actually true.’
Mark considered. His memories of that time were full of hectic colour and jittery excitement. It was when the dealership was really getting going. It was while he was with Izza that he had made his first sale to the British Museum. He remembered coming back from meetings, strung to the maximum tension with adrenalin. He remembered how her languor and her tallness had turned him on. He remembered very exactly how he had felt about her archaic vocabulary and the slow way she drew out her complex sentences, how he’d relished it as he relished the virtuosity of a glass-blower or, for that matter, of a football team playing perfectly in concert. He remembered her scent. He remembered how naked she seemed, far more so than any of the other people with whom he’d been to bed. The softness of her thighs. The blueness of her veins. She’d seemed pretty real to him.
‘Now you’re making things up again,’ he said.
‘Probably,’ said Tristan. ‘That’s what lovers do.’
PIPER
He kept the bus parked on the old airstrip, between the remains of a hangar and a couple of abandoned horse trailers. That way, he thought, if one of the tricky winds that sometimes came off the sea hurtled through, the old lady would be propped both sides. A double-decker is an unstable thing. A wonder really that Hyde Park Corner wasn’t heaped up with toppled red carcasses. Perhaps people in London drove very slow. He supposed they must. He couldn’t say. He’d never been.
The bus was his home, but for his daily back-and-forth he used the transit. Powder-blue, but then he’d got the kiddies to jazz it up for him. A spring day, and he’d gone into Franklin’s and the two girls were teetering about in those skirts that were more like socks really – knitted, tight – and he’d said, ‘What are you doing with that lot?’ A great pile of aerosols, gold and silver and red and green.
‘They won’t be needed again ’til next Christmas,’ said the one with the long black-painted nails. ‘We’ve got to put out the seed potatoes now, and the potted daffs.’
He said, ‘I’ll take them off your hands.’
She said, ‘What, all of them?’ and her friend sniggered. Or perhaps they weren’t friends. He thought about it sometimes. About what it must be like to do a job that kept you every day in the same place. Suppose there was someone there who drove you round the twist? A nightmare that would be, a real nightmare.
The girls let him have the spray-paint cheap because someone had come in on Christmas Eve, that’s what they said, and complained about how one of the nozzles was all gummed up. ‘It’s like aeons they’ve been here,’ said the other one, the smiler. ‘Anyway, when did you last see anyone spray-paint a teasel?’
‘My mum still does it, every year,’ said black-nails, but Piper was already shovelling the shiny cylinders into his big bag. ‘Fiver for the lot,’ he said, and they let him take them.
Come Sunday he had the whole of the junior school out at the airstrip. He made overalls for them out of cement bags and he told them he wanted the van to look like a birthday present, so when they’d painted every inch of it they got a roll of
silver foil out of the bus (he kept his kitchen neat as could be – everything put away in the little drawers he’d fixed up) and they made a big silver bow and fixed it to the bonnet. He took off his shirt then (it was one of his good ones) and stood there in his old combats and gave the two littlest ones the last two cans of paint – green for the deaf boy who chirruped as he talked, red for that girl who was so tiny he wondered was she all right, or what. They each painted one leg, and half his bum, and then they started on his bare chest and he didn’t want to spoil the day by yelling at them. Took hours, it did, to get it off his chest hair and the scrubbing with white spirit gave him a rash.
The mothers complained about that too, and the next day Sylvia from Shortcuts called after him down the street, ‘Thanks for the business, Piper. I’ve been cutting sparkly hair non-stop since school came out.’ They went for a drink and he showed her his golden belly button. The chirruping boy was hers. All the mums were glad of a morning’s peace when he took the kiddies off their hands.
This time of year it was all rats. Late August, September, he’d be running all over the county with his wasp gear. Mice, of course, that was pretty constant, though he used to say to them all, ‘You don’t need me. Get a cat.’ He wasn’t a pushy salesman – didn’t need to be.
When he was only a squit of a thing he’d made his Ma a mouse out of half a hazelnut shell. He drew on eyes and whiskers with her eyeliner, and glued on a bit of string for a tail. Sweet, it was, with its pointy nose. Some of the mice he poisoned were that small. It bothered him, really, that people couldn’t live and let live, but you can’t be an exterminator if you’re going to get upset. People don’t like mouse pellets in their bread bins. They just don’t. You can’t blame them. He knew all about bubonic plague. Not that you’re likely to pick that up in Suffolk.
It was a substantial town. The market square was broad and entirely enclosed by buildings, not one of which was less than a hundred and sixty years old. A lych-gate opened on to the churchyard, which was rectangular and amply large enough to contain all the smug and boastful tombstones that had been erected there by generation upon generation of townsfolk, proud of their families’ long continuance in this place. Even the semis flanking the London road were, by modern standards anyway, solidly built.
Piper knew, though, on what an insecure and permeable base this handsome assemblage of shops and pubs and houses had been founded. It was not immediately evident to a visitor – because the river ran beneath the Thoroughfare through a subterranean channel, and because the bridges carrying walkers from one river bank to another traversed only the side-alleys – that this was a town suspended above water and air, above a system of tubular vessels as complex as those which conduct blood to the extremity of a limb. A town should rest on solid matter, if it is to be safe from alarums, but this one stood on a bed of liquid, dark river-water, and of gas, the dank air of underground.
Such tunnels are unattractive to human beings. The engineers who descended there periodically to dredge out the silt and to clear the points of ingress from the sewers, and the egress to the river downstream, went doggedly, and only because such work is well remunerated. For Piper’s antagonists, though, the vaults and undercrofts beneath the town constituted an entirely congenial habitat – moist, dark, rich in nutritional foodstuffs both animate and decayed. They liked the privacy, and the easy access, by drainpipe mostly, to the houses raised above them. Piper’s services would never cease to be required.
Sylvia always allowed plenty of time for breakfast because her little boy would get agitated, and then he couldn’t get his porridge down. She read aloud to him to keep everything calm, and he would gaze at her.
He was very intelligent. She knew that, even if nobody else did. But when he fixed his eyes on her as she read there was something a bit spooky about it. He sucked the words from her lips into his mind. She read the sort of stories children his age like, about furry animals, and sometimes he would move his hand very gently about three inches above the tabletop as though he was stroking a guinea pig.
Sometimes she thought she loved him so much she would explode. When there was a man, when you felt that strongly about a grown man, then you knew what to do about it, though he wouldn’t always be interested. But loving children didn’t have an outcome like that. All you could do was stare and stare at them and sometimes it made her want to cry. She would stop and mime eating and he would look bewildered but then slowly he would lift his spoon and she would carry on.
The porridge was delicious. She put honey in it, and apple stewed with cloves. It was their favourite food. When the boy’s father was still living with them they didn’t have it so often. So his leaving wasn’t all bad, she supposed.
One morning she looked up from the page and Billy’s eyes weren’t on her. That was unusual. He was looking at something near her elbow. She looked too, and there was a rat. Its teeth were yellow. She was terrified. She didn’t know how it could have got up on to the table and at once it seemed to her she could feel things climbing up her legs, scrambling over her shoulders, crossing her lap.
She stood up and the rat looked over its shoulder and was gone. She saw it whisk into the space under the kitchen sink. The boy began to cry, and so did she. He said ‘Ratty’, and she made herself smile at him, but she took away his porridge unfinished and got him into his coat and hurried him along to the school as fast as she could go without running.
All that morning Piper worked flat-out. He had to lug his stuff from one end of the Thoroughfare to another. He had a word with the woman in the estate agent who kept an eye on the parking when Mr Plod wasn’t in town and she said, ‘All right, just for once, but don’t block the view of my window display.’
He stopped up pipes. He re-fixed skirting boards. He put wire mesh over fireplaces and piled bricks on top of trapdoors. He gave instructions about the protection of family pets. In each house he left half a dozen saucers full of pretty powder-blue pellets. He said, ‘It’s unlikely you’ll find them dead. They take themselves off. And it’s more than unlikely you’ll find them alive now I’ve been through. That doesn’t happen.’ He was wearing his red and green trousers. The paint made them rather stiff, but waterproof, and he wore them all the time for work now. When the mothers noticed them they smiled at him.
The next day there were no rats to be seen, and Piper was able to get on with some maintenance around the bus. He reckoned he could. He’d done so well the day before. Not that everyone had paid up right away, but he’d go easy on the ones who were waiting for their benefits. Some of the men said he got paid a different way. He ignored the talk. Half of the women in town were collecting their pensions, for Christ’s sake. He kept it professional, always, but he did think a bit about Sylvia now that that fellow was gone. Her house smelled of something warm and sharp that reminded him of home.
Anyway he’d filled up on petrol and paid Mike at the garage what he owed him and closed his tab at the Bull. Rats were his enemies, but where, he thought, would he be without them? Up shit creek without a paddle.
On the third day the woman who came in from the county town to teach the big ones computer skills arrived early, as she always did because it took her a while to set up. She went into the larger of the two classrooms, and put on the light and the floor reared up and came towards her and flowed across her feet and on into the corridor. She screamed until she had no more breath and then she fainted and when she came to she was on the ground and there were things tangled in her hair, things scrabbling and tugging at it, and a sour, repulsive smell.
The parents waiting outside could hear her. Some of them made calls on their mobiles. They couldn’t guess what was going on. Then they saw the double doors open, as they always did around this time of the morning. The terracotta plaques said G for girls on the left, B for boys on the right, though of course the children all went in together nowadays. Miss Ellie had a theatrical way of flinging the doors wide to announce t
he start of the morning. This time, though, they seemed to bulge, and then yield. It was like a birth, and what was born was legion, horrible, and very fast.
Parents picked up their littlest ones and ran with them, shouting to the bigger boys and girls to follow. They slammed their doors shut behind them, those who lived in town, and ran upstairs. The farming families got in their cars and sat – adults quivering, children sobbing – like sailors on an eel-infested sea. The tarmac was seething. There was a high-pitched chattering, and always that smell.
The ones with phones stopped dialling 999. They weren’t getting through anyway. They all called Piper.
He was clearing the brambles round the back of the hangar. He fancied setting up a sort of workshop there. He’d been thinking about that hazelnut mouse and it had got some ideas flowing. The holidaymakers who rented cottages nearer the coast in August, they were always looking for little somethings to take home. He could rent one of the tar-paper shacks the fishermen didn’t use any more – might get one for free actually. The Mouse House, he’d call it. He could get a whole load of those sugar mice his mother used to put in his stocking. Cards. He’d make biscuits. Gingerbread mice. Mice made out of seashells. He’d always fancied himself as a woodcarver. He could make whole families of them. He imagined a mother mouse in an apron and father with a beret. Soft toys too. Sylvia – she made her own clothes. Must have lots of scraps. It’s a pretty easy shape to cut out. A kind of partnership.
Hold on there. Keep it professional.
In the bus, while he hummed to himself over the racket of the strimmer, his phone rang and rang and rang.
The streets were deserted. All the shops had closed, those that had opened at all. At least twice a year, when there’d been heavy rain upriver, water seeped up through the cobbles of the Thoroughfare, turning back gardens into bogs, and making the lino on kitchen floors squelch underfoot. Most of the families had sandbags about, just in case. Now people had jammed them against the inside of their front doors – not the right way to do it, but no one wanted to let anything in. No one opened a window. If the rats could climb up the slick slippery interiors of the drainage pipes it would be no trouble for them to hoist themselves up a perpendicular brick wall. People heard scurrying on the roof tiles, and rammed chests of drawers across chimney breasts. A child came screaming out of a bathroom and her mother slammed the toilet seat down, just in time, on a wet dark thing.
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