Sam was up on the roof when I left the next morning. He called out to me and came down, descending through the scaffolding with alarming speed and jumping from the bottom level instead of using the ladder. He began to report on what he’d found the previous day; I told him that Aileen and I had discussed it and we’d like him to do whatever was necessary. ‘I’ll do you another estimate,’ he said. There was no need, I told him, and this statement of trust was accepted with a curt nod, that’s all. There was no meaningful eye contact during the two or three minutes that we were talking, no under-meaning to anything he said. Once the business stuff had been concluded we exchanged a few words about the weather, how nice the garden was looking, this and that. It was as though I was having a chat, in passing, with a friendly workman whom I’d never met prior to that morning. Aileen, had she seen us talking, would not have suspected a thing – but I didn’t have the impression that Sam was conducting himself in this way because of the risk of our being observed. It seemed instead that he had decided, having tricked his way into close proximity to me, that he was simply going to be himself, to allow me to see who he was – to see that he was, at heart, someone quite unlike the hooligan I’d seen a few weeks earlier.
Or this is what I found myself hoping, and for about as long as it took me to drive to the end of the road I managed to push to the back of my mind the knowledge that nothing had been resolved, and the near certainty that, whatever resolution was to come about, it could only be calamitous. Nonetheless, I was fairly confident that there was no immediate danger, and that was enough to keep the feeling of dread at a less acute level than it had been the day before. It was like having an indefinite stay of execution.
Day two of life with Sam in attendance was uneventful – again, Aileen’s interaction with him was limited to handing over a few cups of coffee. On day three there was even less contact, because Aileen had a meeting up in London, so she was out of the house for most of the day. She gave him a key and put the cafetière and coffee jar on the work surface for him, but when she came home nothing in the kitchen had been touched, as far as she could tell. The weather during these first three days was consistently fine. On the Friday, however, the morning began with drizzle. Sam set to work, with a baseball cap, and the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over it, as protection against the rain. By mid-morning the drizzle had become heavy. Aileen stepped outside to check on him: there he was, sitting on his plank below the eaves, doing something to the soffits, with his arms and head sticking out of a black plastic bin liner that he’d converted into a rain-jacket. She asked him if he was OK up there. ‘Hunky-dory, Mrs Pattison,’ he called back, giving her a thumbs-up. An hour so later there was a downpour so sharp and sudden it made Aileen look up, thinking that something had flown into the window. The windows of the Toyota, she saw, were steamed up, so she assumed that Sam was sheltering in it. Grabbing an umbrella, she went out. The temperature had fallen by several degrees and the rain was bouncing off the path. Sam wound down his window and assured her that he was fine where he was. ‘Early lunch, Mrs P,’ he said, waving a sandwich. The persuasion of the kindly and shivering Aileen could not be resisted, however. Holding the umbrella over her head, he escorted her to the kitchen door.
She made him a mug of coffee. It turned out that he liked a lot less milk in his coffee than she’d been giving him, but he’d not said anything. A shy boy, she thought he was, after this conversation in the kitchen. The assurance with which he’d presented himself when he’d appeared on the doorstep, and when he’d brought the estimate, was but a superficial layer. That’s what she told me that evening, when we talked about him. He would meet her eye only for a split second at a time, she said, and it was a while before he’d give her replies that were longer than a single sentence. Eventually she’d managed to eke out of him that his father had been very keen on DIY, and that Sam had picked up a lot of his skills from him. ‘He could do anything,’ Sam had said, with a tone from which Aileen had deduced that Mr Hendy was dead, but she didn’t like to ask if this was the case. I was about to say, ‘It isn’t’, but I bit back the words in the nick of time; as Aileen relayed Sam’s words to me, I had to concentrate on listening as though this was the first time I’d heard them. He’d told Aileen that he’d grown up in the Midlands, but not that the Hendys weren’t his birth parents. She’d quickly desisted with the personal questions, because it was obvious that he was uncomfortable talking about himself – so uncomfortable, in fact, that she’d begun to form the impression that this was a young man with an unhappy past. They’d spent about half an hour in each other’s company. Sam had told her about the Highgate banker with the cost-no-object music room, and was markedly more at ease with a topic that was not focused on himself. Then the rain had abated and Sam announced that he should be getting back to work.
At this point something remarkable had happened. Sam was carrying his mug to the dishwasher (tidiness and helpfulness – more feathers in his cap) when Aileen, having put the milk back in the fridge, accidentally closed the fridge door more forcefully than she’d intended. It’s a very large fridge, so the door can make quite a boom when it slams, as it did on this occasion, and the sound so startled Sam that the hand in which he was holding the mug jerked upwards, spilling the dregs on his jeans. He grimaced, as though he had committed some terrible gaffe in front of people he had wanted to impress. Glancing at Aileen, he saw that she’d seen what had happened, and this prompted another grimace, less extravagant than the first. It was the expression of a man who knows he has to make a difficult decision immediately.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I get jumpy sometimes. That sounded like something else.’ She asked him what it was, and he replied that it was like the noise a grenade launcher makes. ‘I was in Iraq,’ he said, as you might explain something trivial, like having a suntan. ‘You should see me if a car backfires. Dive into dustbins, I do,’ he said, making light of it, but Aileen could tell he was shaken and that it was best to let him go without saying anything more.
‘Strange, don’t you think?’ Aileen asked me. ‘Half an hour he was sitting there, and he never so much as mentioned the fact that he’d been in the army. From the way he’d talked, she’d thought he’d been a builder for years and years.
Keen to change the subject, I said I didn’t think it was so strange that Sam hadn’t said anything about his having been a soldier; perhaps he wanted to forget all about it, I suggested.
12
In other circumstances I might have developed some sort of liking for Sam. In fact, for a few days I did find myself liking him from time to time – when I wasn’t wondering what was really going on with him, that is, and wishing he weren’t there.
On the first Saturday morning he had been at work for an hour or so when I went out to buy the newspaper. As I was closing the gate he whistled to me and came down from the roof, again at reckless speed. He asked me how I felt about going up onto the roof, because he’d like me to take a look at what he was doing and what he’d already done. ‘And I could do with having a word with you as well. In private,’ he added. This didn’t strike me as ominous; it seemed rather that he was embarrassed about whatever it was he needed to discuss. So as soon as I’d returned from the shop I climbed up the ladders to join him.
Sam was sitting on the ridge, eating from a tin of rice pudding with a plastic spoon. ‘Mid-morning snack,’ he said, before slithering down the roof on his backside. There was a ladder he could have used; hooked onto the ridge, it lay to the side of an area that had been stripped of its tiles. The discarded tiles were stacked where I was standing, on the narrow platform at the top of the scaffolding; the platform shifted an inch when Sam landed on it. ‘Making progress,’ said Sam, indicating the area of exposed battens. He was wearing a T-shirt, so for the first time I could see clearly the tattoo on his forearm: the words were ‘Villa Forever’. The burn scar on the other arm held my attention for a fraction of a second longer. He noticed this, and I thought for a moment
he was going to make a remark about it, but instead he put down the tin of rice and lifted an old tile from the heap. With no effort he snapped off a piece of it. ‘Most of them are this bad,’ he said, and he broke another to show that this was true. ‘Surveyor should have picked this up,’ he remarked, giving me a look that said I’d been duped. The replacements were going to be a bit brighter than these, he said; it wasn’t possible to match them exactly, not unless he used tiles that were as wrecked as these. He was going to muck up the new ones before putting them down, so it wouldn’t look too much like there was a bloody great sticking plaster on the roof. ‘More like a toupee, if you like,’ he said.
He directed my attention to the repairs he’d made to the chimney stack. ‘This is new, and this, and that, and that,’ he said, indicating his handiwork with a trowel. If he hadn’t pointed out which parts were his I’d have had great difficulty distinguishing them: the colour of the new mortar was identical to the colour of the old, and the texture was the same. What Sam had done was different only in that it was so meticulous – each vein of mortar had been finished off at a perfectly even angle, a few degrees off the vertical, as precisely as a picture frame. He’d tidied up the flashings as well, he told me, leaning on the roof so that he could show me exactly where the invisible restoration had been carried out. ‘There’s one other thing,’ he announced, and he strode across the platform with so heavy a tread that it quivered like a rowing boat on water. He noticed that I was nervous, I think, but he said nothing except ‘Look here,’ as he crouched to show me where the seams in the guttering were coming apart.
We discussed the pros and cons of cast iron, aluminium and plastic; without much consideration of the matter, I commissioned him to undertake the priciest of the various alternatives. ‘That’s what I’d do,’ he said. ‘No point in cutting corners if you don’t need to.’ It appeared that our conversation had now ended. I reminded him that he’d asked to have a word with me. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, smacking his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘The thing is, I’m a bit out of pocket at the moment. Cash-flow problems. I’ve had to pay that wanker for a new windscreen. He’s agreed he won’t press charges if I cough up. Can you believe it? So I was wondering if you could advance me a few quid. Say a couple of hundred?’ I told him that this would be fine; he said he needed cash, and he needed it today, if possible. That could be arranged, I told him – I’d be going into town in the afternoon and would call at a cashpoint. I was happy to get more, if that would help. He blinked at me as if I’d offered him a lavish bonus. ‘That’d be great, yeah,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it.’ Then, as if on an impulse, he seized my hand and shook it.
The sudden gesture was disconcerting enough, but it was accompanied by an expression of such fervent gratitude that I was forced to look away. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said.
‘You’re happy with what I’ve done?’ he asked, though there could not have been any doubt that I was.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘That’s good,’ he said, as though my approval meant that our relationship was making progress. He nodded, raised his eyebrows, blew out a breath: a worry had been cast away, he was letting me know. It was an exaggerated performance, as was the way he now grabbed the scaffolding handrail and inhaled greedily, like someone who had been driving all day and, having at last arrived at his seaside destination, was getting his fill of the cleansing sea air. ‘Fantastic day, isn’t it?’ he said. The intention was to detain me for a while longer. It wasn’t a fantastic day: the air was mild and very still; fat white clouds occupied most of the horizon to the south; overhead the sky was more or less blue – a washed-out blue. It was a pleasant day, that’s all.
‘It’s very nice,’ I replied.
‘Gearing up for the summer over there,’ he said, pointing towards the Jermans’ house, where a thick hosepipe wound across the grass and drooped into the water of the kidney-shaped pool. To the right of the pool, Claire Jerman was steering a large mower around the cherry trees. The Jermans have the biggest house in the vicinity, so I was expecting from Sam an observation on the lives of the idle rich, but instead he let out an abrupt and very loud laugh, and started telling me about a friend of his from his army days who’d met this girl at a club and they’d gone back to her place, which turned out to be right at the top of a high-rise block – ‘which wasn’t a problem right away, because it was dark and they had other things on their minds, but in the morning she opened the curtains and he really freaked out, because he had this thing about heights and there he was with all these pigeons flying about below him and only a pane of glass between him and the big plunge. Put a bit of a dampener on the relationship. His place was a pit, but if they went back to hers he had to stay away from the windows. Should have seen him in a helicopter,’ said Sam, delighted at the recollection of it. ‘Sweat pouring off him. Pints of it, and this is Armagh I’m talking about, not the desert. The watchtowers – he could just about handle them. Higher than that: not a happy boy. Great shot, though. Could shoot the knackers off a hedgehog from two hundred yards,’ he said, aiming an imaginary rifle in the general direction of Claire Jerman. ‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘I get the feeling you’re not too comfortable up here. Being up high, I mean.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m fine.’
‘You sure?’ he asked me, doubtfully.
‘I’m fine,’ I repeated. ‘But I should be getting back to ground level.’
Sam smiled, as if at the laudable stubbornness of a doughty old man. ‘I love heights,’ he went on. ‘Always have. Gives me such a buzz,’ he said, smacking a palm against the scaffolding bar, making the platform quiver. When he was a boy his parents – ‘Mr and Mrs Hendy’, he clarified needlessly – used to take him to Kinver Edge on Sundays, and at Kinver there was a special tree that he always had to find. He would clamber right to the top of it while Mrs Hendy watched him, gnawing her fingernails to the quick because she was thinking of the afternoon he’d been climbing a tree in the park with a friend and the friend had fallen out and broken a leg so badly that he could hardly kick a ball straight after the plaster had come off. More than anything else, Sam had wanted to be a pilot. For a while he’d even thought of trying for the RAF, before his teachers told him not to waste his time. ‘Need more up top than I had to offer,’ he explained. He couldn’t stand it when kids in his class would come back after the summer having flown to Spain for their holidays, while he’d had to make do with a week in the Black Mountains, ‘which aren’t really mountains, either’. One year they went to Snowdonia, he told me, the words coming out of him with barely a gap between them. Snowdon was a real mountain, and he’d imagined himself standing on the summit ‘like Edmund fucking Hillary’ but it had rained nearly all week and when it wasn’t raining it was either dark or ‘the cloud was so thick you might as well have been standing in a fucking bus stop in Coventry’. (It had struck me that he’d not been swearing as much as usual – hardly at all, in fact – and that this must have required some effort on his part. Now that he was getting up a head of steam, the swearing had resumed.) ‘Used to really piss me off, it did,’ he went on. ‘All these kids getting on planes like it was no different from catching a bus. I suppose we could have afforded a crappy package deal to Torremolinos, but that wasn’t my folks’ idea of fun and I can’t say I blame them. Fresh air and loads of greenery, that’s what they liked. And it was OK. Don’t get me wrong. I had some good holidays. Some fucking grim ones, but some good ones too.’
There followed immediately a recollection of a good one – the best holiday of his life, no less. They had spent a fortnight on the west coast of Ireland (‘my mum, Mrs Hendy, has some cousins there’), in the course of which they had visited the Cliffs of Moher. ‘Fuck me, the Cliffs of Moher,’ Sam declared, with a sort of elated yelp, raising his hands to gesture at the cliffs’ immensity. It was, he said, ‘totally amazing. You’re lying on the grass, on the edge, with your face hanging over this drop, and there�
�s hundreds of birds – gulls and guillemots and whatever – wheeling around in the air. And these fucking birds are like moths, they’re so far below you, and the sea is hundreds of feet below where the birds are. You can see all the foam on the sea. You can see the water smacking up against the cliffs. Tons of spray. But you’re so far up, you can’t hear it. It’s weird. It’s like you’re watching a film of the sea and someone’s turned the sound off. You been there?’ he asked me. I shook my head. ‘You should. You really should,’ he said, exhilarated, as if he’d come from the cliffs this very morning and was urging me to set off right away. ‘Such a blast. Like it was all I could do to stop myself from jumping off. You know what I mean? You’ve got all these hundreds of feet of air below you,’ he said, leaning out to gaze down into the empty air below us, ‘and there’s part of you that just wants to fall through it, to have that buzz for a few seconds. You must have had that feeling sometimes. No? Once or twice?’ Told that I’d never had that feeling, Sam was momentarily deflated, not – it seemed to me – by my implication that the impulse to fling himself off a cliff was perhaps not entirely healthy, but simply at learning this was not an area of experience we could discuss on an equal footing.
He recovered with a question that was the sort of thing a boy might say to someone he’s desperate to befriend, and for that reason it was touching, in a way. ‘You ever been in a helicopter?’ he asked me. I told him I had not. ‘It’s fantastic,’ he said. ‘You should do it. Like floating in a bubble. Well, not floating. It’s noisy as fuck, so it’s not floating. But you know what I mean. There’s just this skin of glass around you and you’re at just the right height. High enough to see for miles, low enough to see what’s going on at street level. The best thing about Ireland was the chopper rides. You’re coming in so close, the TV aerials are bending over, and then you bank and shoot right up. One moment you can count the cups on the kitchen table, five seconds later you can see all the way to Belfast. Fucking brilliant,’ he said, watching his hand as it swerved and dipped between us, and then he glanced at me and brought his hand down, with a sideways flicker of his eyes, which might have been an expression of irritation at what he took to be my unresponsiveness.
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