by Baker, John
It was as if he was reading from a script and the script was only engaging a fraction of his attention. She felt that she was the object of his attention, as if he was observing her with a lascivious leer.
When he’d finished presenting his case she left it to Steven Packard to reply. ‘Thank you, Mr Hayes,’ he said. ‘We might be able to help. We’ll put your proposals to the trustees at their next meeting.’
There was a farther exchange between them. Hayes wanted to know when the next meeting would be and Steven said something about not being able to promise anything. The value of the pound, contracts already entered into, but that the trustees would certainly feel sympathetic to the proposal.
She didn’t listen. She stayed in the chair and wished for the man to get out of her office. All through the drone of their conversation she felt his eyes on her.
When the meeting was drawn to a close Hayes and Steven shook hands. Then Hayes came to her desk and she felt and heard him extend his hand to her. His breathing was controlled; he measured each inhalation and exhalation. Slowly, as if he were counting. It seemed as though the whole meeting had been designed for this moment. The moment of contact. She took a breath and gave him her hand. His hand was large. He was a tall man with an athletic build and he held on to her hand for a fraction too long. Angeles withdrew it, a little too quickly for the proprieties of social convention.
She stuttered, covering her embarrassment with a peremptory dismissal: ‘Thank you, Mr Hayes, we’ll be in touch soon.’
She remained seated at her desk while Steven Packard showed the man out. She felt her right hand where she had come into contact with him. He’d worn a waterproof plaster on his right thumb.
‘What do we know about him?’ she asked Steven Packard when he returned.
‘Not a lot. Lives on the Wetherby Road.’
‘Check the address, will you, Steven? Go round there and make sure he’s who he says he is?’
‘You didn’t like him, did you?’
‘He made my flesh creep.’
On the way back to Sam’s place she asked the chauffeur to stop at Sainsbury’s. She wanted to get a couple of salmon steaks for the evening meal. But there was something wrong. Was he there? Hayes, or whatever he called himself, at the fish counter?
There was something. No one spoke and there was no contact, but she could feel his presence, hear his breath slowly inhaling and exhaling.
She got the salmon steaks and put them in her basket, her hands trembling so much that she could barely control her fingers.
‘Look back,’ she said to the chauffeur as they walked away towards the checkout. ‘The man at the fish counter, what does he look like?’
‘There’s no one there,’ the chauffeur told her.
‘When I was buying the fish. There was a man behind me, over to the right. Did you see him?’
‘I can’t be sure,’ he said. ‘But if there was someone, I didn’t take him in I’m afraid.’
‘You couldn’t describe him?’
‘No, ma’am, sorry.’
Steven Packard was on the phone a few minutes after she got in the house. ‘Really strange,’ he said. ‘The house on the Wetherby Road, the address Hayes gave? It’s an empty building. No one lives there.’
She put the phone down and thought it all through again. She remembered biting down on the man’s thumb, but couldn’t remember if it was his right or his left. She knew she had bitten deep, though. It wouldn’t have healed yet. He’d be sure to have a dressing on it.
She went back to the door and checked she’d locked it after her. Her fingers were shaking with fear as she imagined the man outside the house. Or was he inside? Her limbs felt feeble and puny as she sat in the chair by the telephone. She dialled Sam’s office number and waited for him to answer.
41
Sam asked Marie to check out the Mr Hayes incident. Steven Packard could give a detailed description of him, distinctive blond hair and all. Someone must have seen him arriving at the Falco offices and there was a chance they could tie him to a model of car, if he’d arrived in one.
Angeles had been shaky when he arrived home but she quietened down after he’d checked the house. By the next day she was almost back to herself. Of course it was only a mask, inside she must have been close to screaming point.
She’d moved the food and crockery in the kitchen, swapped them around. Sam couldn’t understand why. Plus she’d bought in packets of pulses, tubes of Tartex, sugar-free jams and a large carton of soya milk. Other stuff, he didn’t know what it was. From the look of it you might feed it to birds in the garden, but he suspected it had some dangerously high nutrition count. Kind of stuff serious joggers ate.
He hadn’t said anything about the furniture being moved, or how his clothes were now confined to the far left of the coat rack. But the dried pulses and the bird food being the first thing you grabbed when you went to the cupboard for a mug: that seemed to indicate a moving on, the entering of a new phase.
‘Hey, everything’s been changed around,’ he said. He used the nonchalant tone, kind of tone Jack Hawkins or Kenneth Moore might have used in one of those old POW movies. The ones where they’re on the escape committee and they don’t want the stoolie to know he’s been sussed.
‘D’you like it?’ she asked. ‘It started off as a cleaning job, but then I found I couldn’t get all the food in the side it was supposed to go, so I swapped it around.’
‘They’re the same size,’ Sam said. ‘Both sides of the cupboard are identical. They’re mirror images of each other.’
‘I know. The way you had it before, it was organized as if you were left-handed.’
‘Is that right?’
‘You want the crockery on the left side of the cupboard because you open the door with your left hand and get things out with your right, which is the strongest if you’re right-handed.’
‘And the food on the right side,’ Sam said, ‘because you open that door with your right hand and get the jam out with your left hand, which is the weakest hand. It’s not so bad to drop the jam?’
‘It’s cheaper,’ Angeles said. ‘A jar of jam comes cheaper than a new plate.’
‘Not if you bought it in a Shelter shop. I could replace the lot for less than a fiver.’
‘You want me to put it back the way it was?’
‘No, it’s OK,’ he told her. ‘I’ll get used to it.’
‘After a while you’ll think it’s better.’
He locked the bathroom door and got a good lather going with the shaving gel. Pants and tights, hand-washed and hanging to dry over the bath. Towels side by side on the rack there, blue and pink. How does she know which is the pink one? Don’t even ask. Matching face cloths hanging on cup hooks from the underside of the shelf. Now these hooks were being used, he remembered, vaguely, a long time ago, screwing them in. He didn’t remember using them, though, not until now. Took someone who was blind to show him where they were.
Music. He strained his ears. She was playing a Clarence Carter song, something else he hadn’t heard since the Berlin Wall came down. Another little gem from her eclectic collection of blind musicians. They’d already had Riley Pucket and Jeff Healey this morning, and he’d woken up to Sonny Terry’s ‘I’m a Burnt Child and I’m Afraid of Fire’, with old Brownie there belting it out in the background. The kind of song makes you want to hit the day running.
She must’ve explored every inch of the room with her fingertips, maybe the entire house? Reaching out in the dark, tagging markers and consigning landmarks to memory. Sam didn’t watch her any more when she was in the house. She walked from room to room, up and down the stairs, as if she were sighted. Within a few days she had grasped the spaces inside the old house and like an experienced colonist was rapidly making them her own. Her scent, which had quickly established itself in her bedroom, now pervaded the whole house. Rochas Tocade it said on the small bottle, no price tag, no list of ingredients, not even a sell-by date. Different
times of day and night it subtly changed its suggestions: rose, bergamot, cedar. Was there occasionally a hint of geranium?
There was often a hint of whisky. He’d looked everywhere except her room and not discovered any bottles. What she did with the empties was a mystery. He’d told her she could go to an AA meeting with him, but she didn’t think she had a problem. Maybe she was right. Some people got by on a few shots a day. She was rich and she didn’t have dependants. So who was Sam Turner to get on a moral high horse about her drinking?
Nobody. But he didn’t see that as a reason to give up. Living with a soak seemed like it ought to be a problem.
The pants. His arm outstretched as if to deny the connection between self and hand, he took the thin rim of lace between finger and thumb. What’re you gonna do next? he asked himself. Eat them? Wear them? Steal them? Whatever floats your boats.
It occurred to him that he might be enacting an ancient rite, something similar to the way an animal scents its territory. Was he also putting down a marker in the fondling of the lace? Would she know he’d been there; smell or perhaps feel where his fingers had lingered for the space of a breath?
The front doorbell rang and he heard Angeles show Ralph through to the sitting room. Her voice coming to him stronger when he cracked open the bathroom door: ‘Sam will be down in a minute. He’s expecting you.’
And I just love being stiffed, Sam thought.
The spirit on Ralph’s breath was sour. He had a smile on his face but his eyes were as thin as paint.
‘You wanted to see me?’ Sam said.
‘Yeah, about the house. Geordie said you wanna give it to a charity?’ He was sitting on the sofa with one leg bent under him. The other leg was jigging up and down at a fair rate of knots, looked as though it wanted to do a dance by itself. In many ways he was the antithesis of Geordie. Brothers are supposed to be similar, Sam thought. They shared the same parents, the same social milieu back in Sunderland, the same crappy education, and yet each of them came with a separate agenda. Sam always held that distant relatives were the best kind.
‘And you’re looking for somewhere to house a charity?’
‘That’s right, yeah. Somewhere for people who haven’t anywhere else.’ He was wearing a black-and-white striped jumper under his donkey jacket and the collar was turned in on itself. Looked like his mother had been in a rush getting him ready to go out.
‘Homeless people?’
‘Yeah, like that. And for people’ve had accidents. They can’t manage to live properly.’
‘When did this Samaritan influence first show itself?’
‘Come again?’
‘Your last ship; it was the Bootham, right. Registered in Thailand?’
Ralph looked down at his hands and shook his head. ‘I’ve bin on lots of ships. On and off I’ve bin at sea for ten years. But I came to talk about the house.’
‘You’ve given up the sea?’
‘Yeah, finished with all that.’ He hooked his thumbs together, index fingers touching, palms outwards, and extended his arms as if to contain the oceans of the world and shove them out of the way. ‘I wanna live for other people now. Dedicate my life.’
Sam made eye contact, watched for a blink or something shifting below the surface of the pupil, but the guy was as steady as the murder rate. Sam sighed. It doesn’t matter what you do, he thought. Summer will have its flies. ‘Only I talked to the agent for the Bootham, guy called Phillips. You remember him?’
‘Phillips?’ said Ralph. ‘No, the name isn’t ringing any bells.’
‘He remembers you,’ Sam said. ‘He told me he’ll never forget you. Could’ve talked about you all day.’
‘I was popular on the ship,’ Ralph said. ‘Lots of good mates.’
‘Now Mr Phillips didn’t exactly express it like that,’ Sam said. ‘He told me that you ripped off two of your shipmates. Took nigh on a grand from the two of them together.’
‘That was a lie,’ Ralph said. He shuffled around like a fart in a trouser leg. ‘Phillips accused me of doing that, but it wasn’t me.’
‘So you do remember Phillips.’
‘There was no proof. If he was so sure it was me, why didn’t he call the fuzz?’
‘Because you’d covered your tracks too well. As you say, there wasn’t enough to prove the case in court. But there was enough for the agent to get you off the ship and blacklist you.’
‘The bastard, taking a bloke’s livelihood.’
‘And for the union to make sure you never get a ship again. They know all about you as well, they reckon you’ve ripped off fellow sailors in every port you’ve sailed from.’ Ralph looked up and out of the window, refusing to respond.
‘What I also learned,’ Sam continued, ‘is that you’re wanted by the Child Support Agency. They’re looking for you to help support your wife and three children.’
‘I’m not married.’
Sam waited a moment. ‘I wouldn’t call it a marriage, either,’ he said. ‘But it was a legal ceremony you went through three years back. Does Geordie know he’s got a nephew and two nieces? A sister-in-law?’
‘This is all allegations,’ Ralph said. ‘There’s no proof for it, any of it. Look, if you don’t wanna give me the house, OK. I’ll look around for something else.’
Sam got to his feet and took a couple of steps over to where Ralph was sitting. ‘You’d better find that something else fairly soon,’ he said. ‘I don’t like you, Ralph, and I’m prepared to make your life miserable. You’re sponging off Geordie and Janet at the moment, looking around for a way to make your life easier, but that’s gonna end quick. Either get a job and pay them for your keep or move out.’
‘You can’t tell me what to do. What happens between me and Geordie’s private.’
‘You’ve got a couple of days,’ Sam told him. ‘Then I tell Geordie everything I know about you.’
Ralph walked to the door, a grin on his face. ‘You’re bluffing,’ he said. ‘You know if it comes to a showdown, Geordie’ll stick to family. If he has to make a decision between you and me, he’ll tell you to go fuck yourself.’
‘You just remember this,’ Sam told him. ‘You’re the kind of guy can get both feet in your mouth at the same time. That’s OK, just makes you look stupid. But imagine what it’d be like to have both of my feet in there as well.’
42
Janet sometimes wondered if she’d got it wrong. In the beginning she’d had a couple of cats, mainly for company. Not that they’d been much good at it. Venus was never there anyway, except for food; and Orchid was always in the house but not at all sociable. They were icons of independence.
Then Geordie came along. He was kind, it was true, and fun to be with. A real love in fact, but he took some looking after. Plus he brought Barney along, a dog into a house full of cats. Life got fuller, but it also got more complicated. All the time she used to have to herself faded away.
By the time Echo was born there weren’t enough hours on the clock to get through the day. The first couple of months had been a walking nightmare and Janet had felt her world imploding. Constant fatigue, the need to give more of herself than she possessed, and the numbing suspicion that she was alone with it all toyed with the fragile perimeter of her sanity.
Ralph was almost the last straw. If he had been the perfect house guest it would have been bad enough, but he was a slimeball who was forever sniffing around, making lewd suggestions, dragging Geordie out on afternoon drinking sessions and eating them out of house and home.
Some people might capitulate to the kind of pressure and stress which had entered her life, turn to migraine, or
the bottle, or Agatha Christie. But tension and adversity had a galvanizing effect on Janet’s consciousness. She was energized, inspired to rise above it, and whereas before Ralph’s arrival she had been tired and listless, she was now fired with the passion of a mission.
‘Cook us some eggs, darlin’,’ Ralph said when he came down. He brought a
strong odour of stale sweat with him. It was mid-morning and Geordie and Echo were sleeping, trying to catch up on the hours they’d missed in the night.
‘Cook ’em yourself,’ she said. ‘I’m not here to wait on you.’
‘OK. I can cook. What about a little kiss, then?’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Oh, mucky language over the breakfast pots. Trying to make Ralph randy?’ He licked his lips, made a face with staring eyes. His long curly hair was so short of vitality it clung to the side of his face for support.
‘You’re disgusting,’ she told him.
‘That’s what they like,’ he said. ‘Women.’
She snorted. ‘And you’re the man to give it to us? Jesus, Ralph, I’m so thrilled. How long’ve you had this effect on women?’
‘Sarky, but you’re more interested than you let on. Geordie’s always tired these days. He walks round like a zombie all day.’
‘Leave Geordie out of it.’
‘Yeah, OK, darlin’, if that’s how you want it. I won’t mention him if you don’t. Not while we’re together.’
‘How much longer are you gonna be here?’ she asked.
‘Come and sit on my knee and I’ll whisper it in your ear.’
‘You know, Ralph, getting splashed with shit while you’re minding your own business is kind of unfortunate.
But there’s a real insanity about jumping in the septic tank.’
He thought about that for a moment, his brow clouded over, as if he’d been hit with a full row of big words. Then he shook his head and smiled his toothy grin. ‘There you go, again,’ he said. ‘Talking dirty words.’
Janet said, ‘Ralph, if I opened my legs for you, would you promise to go away for ever? Walk off down the street and go ruin someone else’s life?’
He smiled. ‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Now we’re getting round to it. I knew you was interested.’
‘Would you? Go away?’
‘Maybe you’d want me to stick around, after you’ve had a sample.’
