The Tryst

by Michael Dibdin

  Since it was a double round, Alex volunteered to help out. Unfortunately, the only way Alex could face the work was by getting fucked up first, and after he did, one house looked much the same as another. The result was that the residents of one street were each treated to over forty copies of the Advertiser dropping through their letter-boxes at five-minute intervals. Some of them phoned to complain, and Alex’s brief career in newspaper distribution came to an end. Steve was transferred to another round, further away but short enough for him to do alone. His only worry was that the money had turned out to be so rubbishy — less than a penny per paper — that it wouldn’t be enough to keep Jimmy satisfied. Jimmy, however, had more important things on his mind. One of the OAPs he and Dave had put the frighteners on had cashed a couple of pension cheques earlier in the day and was carrying over seventy quid. Jimmy was so impressed by this that he forgot all about Steve’s contributions to the housekeeping. Doors were opening up, possibilities beckoning, a whole new lifestyle awaited. Unlike the clueless wankers he lived with, Jimmy had always known that there was more to life than glue and cider and condemned houses. There was heroin and Bacardi and B and Bs on the south coast, to say nothing of souped-up BMWs, designer threads and 250-watt-per-channel stereo rigs. All you needed was cash. Getting it had turned out to be a lot easier than he had imagined.

  Meanwhile, Steve carried on distributing the Capital Advertiser to 230 homes every week. He liked the job. He saw himself as a sort of postman. He himself never received any post, of course, but he knew that people looked forward to the postman’s visits. In a way Steve was even more welcome. The postman brings bad news as well as good, but the bad news Steve brought always happened to other people. There was a lot of it — brave kiddies, tragic mums, heartless conmen, abandoned pets, ravished grannies and torched tramps — but since it all happened to other people, it was actually good news, Steve reckoned. The more bad things happened to other people, the less likely they were to happen to you. Like a postman, Steve had little contact with his clients. As the weeks passed, however, he got to know his route, and came to notice the difference in the doors through which he delivered the paper. They were all roughly the same size and shape, but the closer you looked, the more you realized that each was an individual. A few had clear glass panels, so that you could see right into the hallway, but this was rare, and anyway the hallway was usually so carefully cleaned and tidied that it amounted to another door. The real house — messy, intimate, full of secrets — began further on. More common were panels of frosted glass. Sometimes the glass was only slightly cloudy, with vertical streaks that were almost clear, through which you could catch glimpses of the interior. Steve never saw anything very interesting going on, but he approached these doors with special excitement, for you never knew. But mostly the glass was completely opaque, giving the door an air of false sincerity, like someone making a show of having nothing to hide. Steve preferred the solid wooden doors that shut you out and made no bones about it. They ranged from drab plywood slabs to complex layered jobs with an antique air. Most conformed to a type and must have been identical at one time, but wind and rain, scrapes and scratches, coats of paint, numbers, names, knockers and bells — to say nothing of letter-boxes at any level from Steve’s shoulder to his foot — combined to make each a distinct presence which the boy gradually came to know. He found his new acquaintances restful and reassuring. Unlike the stotters, they had no moods. Come rain or shine, they were there, lined up in their places, waiting their turn. Steve fed them one after another, taking his time, pacing himself. It all seemed very safe and satisfying, until one day early in March.

  Grafton Avenue was towards the end of Steve’s round. One side had been swept away to make room for a council estate, but since this formed part of the adjoining delivery zone Steve was conscious of it only as scenery. His side of Grafton Avenue started off as a terrace of three-storey semi-detached houses with pillared bay windows and steps leading up to an imposing portico where he left a pile of papers, one for each of the flats into which the houses had been divided. Further along these gave way to bijou villas, heavy in architectural extras such as moulded cornices and decorative brickwork. They reminded Steve of the elderly Asian who ran the OOD S ORE: at once plain and exotic, other-worldly and grasping, like a prince in disguise or a magician fallen on hard times. The last house in the road was quite different from all the others. It was so high and narrow that it looked likely to fall over at any moment. The end walls were windowless expanses of mortar, as though the existing house was a remnant of a much larger building. The main floors were set in a bay, giving the house a thrusting, aggressive air. At first sight there was no way in or out, but in fact a path of quarry tiles led into a lean-to porch at the side of the house. Here a short set of steps continued up to an enclosed area where leaves and litter had collected over the years. Once your eyes adjusted to the gloom, you could just make out the front door, four massive panels of unpainted wood separated by strips of heavy scrolling. A large, dull, brass letter-box was inset in the horizontal strip between the upper and lower panels. On the doorpost, at about the same level, was an ivory bell-push in a circular brass surround.

  Steve had learned that letter-boxes were as individual as the doors themselves. Some opened as flaccidly as a toothless mouth, others clamped their jaws on the rolled newspaper like playful dogs. But what happened that afternoon in Grafton Avenue was something Steve had never seen before: when he inserted the folded copy of the Capital Advertiser into the letter-box, instead of either lying there, wedged and inert, or falling limply through, the paper was plucked from his fingers and pulled smoothly inside, like a video-tape when you put it into the machine.

  Steve snatched his hand away before the door had that too. After a moment, the letter-box opened again and an envelope emerged. It tipped over the rim and fluttered to the doorstep as the letter-box closed with a definitive bang. Steve picked up the envelope and ran down the steps and along the path as fast as he could go. Safe in the street again, he set down his orange sling and looked at the envelope. There was no name or address written on it. He tore it open. Inside there was a five-pound note and a pencilled list.

  Tin corned beef (Fray Bentos or other reliable brand)

  Dried peas

  Small pot sardine and tomato paste

  Marmite (Large size)

  Jam, strawberry for preference

  Sugar cubes

  Two tins of prunes

  Packet of tea

  Please leave by door. Keep change.

  Steve felt slightly disappointed. He had been hoping for something less ordinary. But when he had finished his round, he went to the Tesco nearby, bought the items on the list and carried them back to Grafton Avenue. When he had almost reached the house again, he noticed a man striding purposefully towards him. He was young, with sharp angular features, all glistening planes of sweaty skin and greasy hair. His face was split in two by a grin like an unhealed wound and his eyes glittered fiercely. His clothes were filthy and threadbare. The trousers were ridiculously short and his socks did not match.

  ‘Do you know what time it is?’ he demanded as he reached Steve, who shook his head. The man laughed contemptuously and walked on.

  When he reached the house, the boy stood in the street staring at it for a long time. The curtains were all tightly closed and no light showed in any of the rooms. Finally he took a deep breath and scampered rapidly up the path, into the dry sheltered darkness of the porch. He climbed the steps, set the bag down and ran quickly back to the street. He stood and watched for some time, but no one emerged. There was no sound, no movement. The house might have been empty for years. After a while it came on to a drizzle, and Steve turned up his collar and started to walk home through the darkening streets.

  4

  Whatever the stotters’ other shortcomings, a morbid sensitivity to each others’ moods was not among them. Steve was perhaps told to stop wanking about rather more often than usual
during the week that followed, but the nearest that anyone came to asking him to account for his behaviour was when Jimmy demanded, ‘You been at the glue or what?’ They were sitting around on what remained of the living-room floor, trying to eat the pizza which Tracy had lifted down Tesco’s, not realizing that it only looked like on the cover after being baked in an oven. A few rounds of paint thinner had dulled their disappointment, however, and most of Jimmy’s brain was now locked up in the kind of circular activity which will paralyse a computer asked to calculate the square root of minus one. Jimmy’s thoughts were less abstruse — he was trying to decide between the relative merits of an indoor or outdoor jacuzzi for the Spanish villa from which he planned to mastermind the drug-smuggling operation he was going to set up as soon as he’d solved his immediate cash-flow problems — but they overloaded his brain so effectively that the mechanism which normally handles swallowing suddenly cut out, leaving Jimmy with a throat full of half-chewed dough going nowhere. Which was all to the good from Steve’s point of view, because by the time Jimmy had stopped choking on curses and gobs of uncooked pizza and Alex had observed darkly that it wasn’t the coughing that carried you off but the coffin they carried you off in, the boy’s state of mind and its causes had been completely forgotten.

  In a sense, though, Jimmy’s guess had not been so far from the truth. Steve was right out of it that week, though this was not down to secret Evostik binges but the prospect of what would happen when he returned to the house in Grafton Avenue the following Friday. The future is a drug to which most people have developed such a tolerance that it requires some quite massive event looming up for their everyday life to be seriously affected, but Steve had spent his fifteen years in a shadowless present where the sun stood always at midday. Now, for the first time, he had something to look forward to, and the effect on his life was like atmospheric lighting in a film: a powerful lateral glare throwing up dramatic shadows, making the ordinary seem strange and exciting. He asked himself the same questions again and again. Who had written the note? Why hadn’t he shown himself? Why had he trusted Steve with the fiver? Why couldn’t he do his own shopping? At first Steve had thought he might be a cripple or an invalid, but in that case surely he’d be fixed up with the council or whoever it was kept people going till they died. Had he just had an accident, fallen downstairs or something? But in that case why hadn’t he asked for help? If Steve hadn’t had to go back there the following week he would probably just have forgotten it. As it was, he spent the time wondering and fearing, scheming and dreaming, savouring the bizarre certainty that in a few days he would know the answer.

  That Friday was blustery and wet. The protective outer layer of papers was already soaked before Steve could free the cord tying them together and get them into the waterproof orange sling. He had made himself a primitive cape out of a piece of plastic sheeting he’d found in a skip, but the sharp edges scratched his chilled skin and the wind tossed it around so much that it was useless, and he soon threw it away. To keep warm, and in anticipation, he moved briskly from house to house. By the time he turned into Grafton Avenue the street-lamps were beginning to glow very faintly, a deep pinkish shade quite unlike the umber glare that showed once the darkness had firmed up. Steve made short work of the three-storey semis, running up the flights of steps and dumping a pile of papers headlined ‘Brave Little Gary Loses His Fight For Life’. The bijou villas got equally short shrift that day, at least until Steve reached the last pair. There he abruptly slowed down, dragging his heels and taking an exaggerated amount of care over the detailed folding and insertion of the paper, for now that he could see his destination it seemed much too near.

  The house looked neither more nor less strange than before; an outcast, a relic, a misconception. Despite his delaying tactics, it was no time at all before Steve stood at the wrought-iron gate, in whose bars a potato crisp packet was trapped by the wind like rubbish in a weir. Somewhere nearby an empty beer can rattled noisily about in the gutter. Steve set off up the path of small tiles that curved past an anonymous shrub to the covered entrance where the steps began. Inside, in the hushed darkness, it already felt warmer. Steve climbed the steps one by one, making as little noise as he could. He felt as though anything at all might happen in the next few moments. It was therefore a slight disappointment as well as a relief when nothing did. The folded newspaper he placed in the letter-box just lay there. He pushed it all the way through and heard it flutter to the floor inside. The letter-box snapped shut again. That was all. He turned away, feeling tricked and cheated. Could he have imagined the incident a week before? Sometimes it was hard to tell where his dreams ended and his life began, what had really happened to him and what had occurred in one of those gaps where the normal rules are suspended and someone you think is asleep turns out to be dead on the bed in front of you, in the room you can’t get out of no matter how hard you try.

  Behind him there was a jarring shudder, as though the whole wall had opened. When he turned, a faint line of light was visible at the edge of the front door. Steve could just make out a figure standing inside. Something white appeared in the opening, fluttering in the darkness like a flag of truce. It was an envelope. Steve reached out and gingerly gripped the corner. The other end was instantly released. He could make out nothing of the figure within except for the eyes, brilliant and restless, busily at work, running over the boy’s face and clothing like a pair of scavenging mice, speedy and discreet but missing nothing. Then the door snapped shut. The next moment it looked as though it had not been opened for years.

  The list was a lot longer this time, and two five-pound notes were enclosed. It added up to quite a fair weight, too. By now Steve was used to the heavy slingful of papers, but by the time he had finished his round the strap had worn a welt across his shoulder that made it quite painful to carry this additional load, so he decided to stop for a rest. On the way back from the supermarket there was a small park, a triangle of grass intersected by an asphalt path where elderly people stood looking airily around while their panicky-eyed dogs laboured to expel sausage-like turds. Just inside the railings at the entrance to the park was a building providing similar facilities for MEN and OMEN, and Steve had discovered that this was a good place for a rest. You were sheltered from the wind and the rain, and one of the cubicles had a broken window which let in a bit of fresh air to dilute the stink of disinfectant and stale pee. Here Steve would settle down and read through the stories. The walls were covered in them, rambling, repetitive, unpunctuated tales about soiled panties and schoolboys’ bums. By now he’d read them all at least once, but knowing what happened and how it all ended just made them more reassuring and relaxing. Surprise, in Steve’s experience, was an overrated quality.

  When he came out, the wind was stronger than ever. His sodden clothes hung stiffly from his body. He suddenly felt tired and hungry and cold, no longer interested in what was going to happen when he got to the house. He turned into Paxton Grove, the street before Grafton Avenue, and trudged the last few hundred yards to the corner. He was still only half-way up the covered steps when he noticed that the front door of the house was open again. Just a crack at first, but as Steve got nearer the gap started to widen. A wave of warmth reached out and enfolded the boy. There were odours in it, intimate and familiar as the smell of his own body. Half-hidden behind the door was a man wrinkled beyond measure, crumpled and shrunk, fabulously old. His skin was dark and blotchy, ridged and troughed with blood vessels and tendons. Only the eyes looked more or less ordinary, which gave them a freakish, alien appearance in that ruined face, as though he had stolen them.

  ‘Come in,’ he urged, beckoning with a hand which resembled one of the bits of chicken that Steve had sometimes found in rubbish bins but learned to reject as inedible. The boy hesitated. The warmth was still flowing out of the open doorway, as though from a limitless reservoir. Its swirling embrace made him feel light-headed and confused.

  ‘Tea’s made,’ the old man sa
id.

  His eyes never ceased their radar-like sweeps, and in their restless movement Steve read an anxiety even greater than his own. What worried him was the idea that this old man might not really be an old man at all, that once the front door was closed he would start laughing maniacally and then pull off his face and head to reveal the blood-streaked features of the demon beneath, like in Dave’s fave video. But there seemed to be no signs that anything of that sort was likely to happen. The man looked no different from any of the other old people Steve had seen making their slow, painful, lonely way along the streets, as though doing penance for some crime. And although he wasn’t aware of it, the smells and the warmth of the house were whispering to him all the time, telling him that no harm could come to him there. Hoisting the orange sling with a certain professional flair, the boy stepped over the threshold.

  Like the house itself, the hallway was tall and narrow. It was lit by a single bulb enveloped in a large bowl of milky glass, which muffled the light so effectively that Steve could only just make out a flight of stairs reaching up to the invisible ceiling and a door standing open into a large front room whose windows were smothered in velvet curtaining. When the old man had finished locking and bolting the front door, he turned the other way, down a long corridor with brass-handled doors opening off it to either side. The walls were covered in discoloured paper decorated with a design of small flowers in diagonal rows. Floorboards creaked beneath the thin runner of threadbare red carpeting. Steve’s fear was still there, but dreamily distanced, like pain by a partial anaesthetic. He had an absurd feeling that they had already walked further than the length of the house. It was no use looking back to correct this illusion, for the old man had already paused to switch off the light behind them.