It was a shock at first to be back in the familiar streets and find them unchanged, to see cars passing by and people walking their dogs. ‘Don’t you wankers understand where you are yet?’ he felt like screaming at them. ‘Haven’t you realized that there’s only one way out of this place?’ But soon it was his own experience that came to seem bizarre, dubious and exaggerated. Things like that don’t happen, he thought, not really. By the time he reached Paxton Grove, the whole episode had come to seem like one of the stories he made up to tell himself or other people. Then he saw Hazchem striding along the pavement towards him, his arms swinging back and forth like a mad soldier, his lips fixed in the usual rictus.
Steve stepped into the gateway of the house he was passing and looked round for cover. A car with no wheels was parked in the concreted-over front garden, its axles supported on piles of breeze-blocks, and the boy crouched down behind it. It was as well to be cautious, even though he was no longer seriously afraid of Hazchem. He knew now that the man’s mocking grin expressed exactly what he himself had felt as he watched the dozy householders shuffling round the block behind their obese pampered pets. Steve had travelled a long way that evening. Hazchem must have made that journey too, only he had somehow got lost and been unable to find his way back. When he got to the house he would tell the old man all this. He would explain to him that there was really no reason to be afraid. Steve’s cuts were starting to smart badly now, and he had just noticed that his clothes were heavily stained with blood. The rapid tattoo of footsteps suddenly ceased, quite close by. For a moment Steve thought that he’d been spotted and Hazchem was going to come up and ask him if he knew what time it was. Then he heard a door slam, and realized what should have been obvious to him all along. No wonder he’d seen the grinning man around there so many times! The boy straightened up, smiling to himself at the thought of what Ernest Matthews would say when he told him that the man he went in such terror of lived just round the corner, that they were practically neighbours!
The house in Grafton Avenue looked reassuringly the same as ever. Its end wall still towered blindly over the adjacent property as though disdaining to take any notice of what went on there, its deeply bayed front still sought to dominate the street with a pompous pretension that was rather pathetic. Steve pushed open the gate and followed the winding path into the lean-to porch. He didn’t have the slightest doubt that the old man would take him in. He would have to. He needed him.
As he reached the top step, the boy stopped dead. The front door stood wide open and a cold draught streamed past, scattering the familiar smells that usually greeted Steve like eager pets. He stood there for a long time before realizing that further resistance was pointless. Then he let the current carry him forward the way he had to go, over the threshold, into the house.
12
‘Well then, it’s about bloody time you got your act together, isn’t it?’
The slow rhythmic throbbing sound from next door continued. It sounded rather like someone trying to start a car with a flat battery.
‘Because it’s your responsibility, that’s why,’ Jenny Wilcox told the phone. ‘This is a stand-up-and-be-counted situation! I’m damned if I’m having my members used as cannon fodder so that you lot can decide whether the battle’s worth fighting or not.’
She slammed the receiver down. For a moment the throbbing sound seemed to have faded, then it returned, peaking and dying as though carried from a distance on gusts of wind. Brushing a few stray crumbs off her leotard, Jenny went over and opened the door to Aileen’s office.
‘Christ, what’s wrong?’
Aileen sat slumped over her desk, head lowered, shoulders trembling. When she lifted her head, her face looked blurred and soft, like pottery which had lost its glaze and was gradually unbaking itself, returning to the damp clay.
‘He waited for her to wake up,’ she murmured.
‘Who?’
‘He just sat there beside the bed, waiting for her to wake up.’
‘Who? Where? When?’
Despite Jenny’s real concern, there was a note of irritation in her voice. Aileen sucked in enough air to stem her sobs and justify her emotion.
‘It’s Steven. I’ve been to the police. They told me …’
‘The police?’
The younger woman’s evident disapproval brought Aileen round like a whiff of ammonia.
‘It’s a police matter,’ she replied flatly, scrabbling in her bag for Kleenex and cigarettes. ‘They showed me the photographs. Everything thrown about, ripped up, smashed, destroyed, the old man beaten to death. Steven was covered in blood from the cuts he got escaping from the other house, so when one of the neighbours saw him leaving they phoned the police. A patrol car picked him up just a few streets away. Naturally they thought he’d done it.’
Jenny tilted her head experimentally in various directions.
‘Just unblocking my synapses,’ she explained. ‘I got embroiled in a slanging match with the area organizer about this planned day of action. Now then, what were you saying? I don’t really understand what this has to do with someone waiting for someone to wake up.’
‘It’s my fault, Jenny, I’m not explaining it well. I’ll tell you some other time.’
‘No, tell me now.’
Aileen would have much preferred not to do so, but after letting Jenny see her break down she felt a need to demonstrate control.
‘All right. Well, let’s begin at the beginning. The police had no difficulty in tracing Steven’s background once they knew his real name. His life is exceptionally well documented, in fact. He’s been in and out of one file or another since the day he was born. That happened in Holloway, where his mother was doing eighteen months for her part in a dope-smuggling operation. Once she got out of prison, things went from bad to worse. Petty theft, a bit of prostitution, then a heroin habit. She ended up in council emergency housing in a bed-and-breakfast in Bayswater. It sounds like an urban concentration camp. One room, one bed, one toilet and kitchen between thirty people.’
‘I hear some councils are thinking of moving their homeless to pre-fab settlements on the outskirts of the city,’ Jenny commented. ‘Sort of a township concept. We’ve a lot to learn from the South Africans in this respect, I always say.’
‘One day Steven’s mother took an overdose, by accident or on purpose. The room was kept bolted from the inside, for protection. Those places are pretty rough, the police said. People get raped and beaten up on the stairs. But Steven was only seven years old. He wasn’t strong enough to open the bolts by himself, even after he realized that his mother wasn’t going to wake up. In the end someone heard his hammering on the door, but it took a long time. No one paid much attention to screams or banging in that place. When they broke down the door the body was starting to decompose. She’d been dead almost a week. Steven had been with her all that time, waiting for her to wake up.’
Aileen grabbed a deep breath and tried to ride the wave of emotion that threatened her. In the end it rolled by without breaking.
‘I must go,’ she said, glancing at her watch. ‘Steven’s social worker is coming to pick him up at three, and I have to try and explain things to him first. What are you doing this evening, Jenny? Douglas is away, and I was wondering if — ’
‘Jon and I have to go to a do at LWT, unfortunately. The usual rent-a-celebrity crowd will be there and it’s important for him to get out and network-build. Did I tell you that he’s in this big new series on famine they’re planning? Off-camera, but you’ll hear him interviewing the victims. He’s quite high profile in Third World disasters, apparently.’
Catching Aileen’s eye, Jenny covered herself by laughing cynically. ‘We’re having a few people over tomorrow for fondue bourguignonne,’ she said as she turned to go. ‘Drop by if you like. I expect we can find an extra fork.’
‘I’m going away, actually,’ Aileen lied.
She stubbed out her cigarette and walked over to the window, with
floorboards flexing beneath her. The glass was flecked with drops of rain so fine they seemed to hang motionless in the air, as though the clouds had collapsed under their own weight like an old ceiling. She stood there thinking how clever she’d been, explaining away her emotion without mentioning its real cause. For Aileen hadn’t told Jenny everything she’d learned from the police, not by a long chalk. She hadn’t told her that one reason why Steven and his mother had been living in squalor was that the woman’s lover, who was also the courier who brought the cannabis in from the Continent, had absconded with her savings, which she’d given him to buy them tickets to safety. By then she knew that she was pregnant, and she’d also begun to suspect that her house in south London, which was used to store the drugs, was under surveillance. When the police finally moved in, a few weeks later, her lover was the only one to escape arrest. Steven’s mother told the police that he’d arranged to meet her at Heathrow with the tickets, but didn’t turn up. It was later established that he had flown from Gatwick to Holland and then back to his native America. The case was relatively insignificant by US standards, and it hadn’t been thought worthwhile to apply for extradition, even though the man’s name and address were known to the police, as indeed they were to Aileen.
That explained a lot, she thought. It explained the likeness between Steven and Raymond, which had so disturbed her. It explained Raymond’s frequent unexplained absences from Brighton, and the fact that he always had plenty of money even though his father proved to be neither rich nor generous. It explained why a man so attractive to women had taken up with a girl like Aileen, plain and shy but so ‘typically English and straight’ that her presence on the pillion of his motorbike ensured that he was always waved through Customs after their brief trips across the Channel. It explained why he had flown back to America so unexpectedly, supposedly to visit a mother who later turned out to have been dead for years, and why he hadn’t bothered to answer Aileen’s passionate letters or seemed particularly overjoyed when she turned up on his doorstep that summer. She should have felt relieved, she supposed. Her instincts had been justified; she wasn’t crazy after all. Raymond really was the boy’s father. That should have made her feel better, but it didn’t. In fact she didn’t feel anything very much, not yet. Her tears had been for the boy. As for herself, she was like a character in a cartoon film who has walked off the edge of a cliff without realizing it and strolls blithely on in defiance of the laws of gravity, protected by his blissful ignorance. Sooner or later, she knew, the reality of what had happened would come home to her and she would drop like a stone.
Her breath had misted the glass in front of her, obscuring the view. Idly she traced the words EAT, SHIT, DIE, BOX with her fingertip. Then she hastily rubbed them out, clearing the glass. There was work to do, and thanks to what the police had told her she was able to approach her talk with Steven in a more positive frame of mind than she would have imagined possible a few hours earlier. The information might have been personally devastating, but professionally it was a godsend. For the first time, Aileen felt that she understood the situation in depth, clearly and completely. Steven Bradley had already suffered more than enough pain for one lifetime, but from now on, she vowed, things would be different. His mother and father were both dead, but the boy would be saved from the wreckage to grow up whole and healthy. Everyone who had come into contact with him agreed that the core of his personality was still intact; indeed, this was one reason why he had not been considered ill enough to warrant in-patient status. But the proper treatment of his psychological injuries had been hampered by their ignorance of their real cause and nature. Now that had been cleared up, Aileen felt confident that he would make a swift and full recovery.
She timed her arrival in Green Ward for just before two o’clock, so as to catch the boy before he could go off with the others to start the afternoon’s activities. When she entered the ward sitting room, Steven was gamely trying to clean the floor with a large industrial vacuum cleaner which made so much noise that he didn’t hear her call him. Aileen stood watching with the feeling of slight distaste that always came over when she saw patients performing tasks labelled ‘work therapy’, although in her view this amounted to little more than coping with staff shortages by exploiting the patients in a way that confirmed their tendency to become institutionalized. It was only after some time that she realized that these thoughts were only possible because the giddy sense of vertigo that had always threatened her encounters with the boy was completely absent. Now she knew the source of those mysterious promptings, their power had been exorcized. When Steven finally switched off the vacuum cleaner, it cost Aileen no effort to go up to him, touch him gently on the shoulder and say, in a kindly but restrained tone, ‘Steven, I’d like a word with you, please.’
They sat down together on a sofa facing the outer wall, whose chessboard pattern here generated two large windows at knee level and half of another just below the ceiling.
‘Did you enjoy your lunch?’ Aileen asked while she waited for the other patients to disperse. As usual, the boy just shrugged.
‘I didn’t have any,’ she went on. ‘I didn’t have time. I had to go and see the police. They’re very pleased, because they’ve finally caught the person who did those terrible things. And it’s all thanks to you, Steven.’
He glanced at her with a look of alarm.
‘Me?’
Aileen nodded and gave him an approving smile.
‘Once they’d learned your real name, you see, they checked their records and discovered that you’d been taken to a police station once before. The sergeant who was on duty that day remembered that two other young people had been there at the same time. One of them had claimed that you were his brother, and you’d gone away with them. Their names had been taken too. One of them was called Jimmy and the other one Dave.’
She paused for a moment, watching the boy. He was glacially still, as though in a state of suspended animation.
‘Dave is now in prison. He was arrested for assaulting an old lady and taking her money. Another boy, called Alex, was arrested with him.’
The squelch of shoes came and went in the corridor. A voice called, ‘How should I know where it’s got to? First I heard we’ve even got one.’ ‘Didn’t you read the circular?’ someone yelled back.
‘Dave refused to co-operate with the police, but Alex did. He said that you used to live with them in a house they were squatting in. There was a girl there as well, a girl called Tracy.’
‘Did they get her too?’ Steve demanded.
‘Who?’
‘The police!’
Aileen shook her head. The boy released a long sigh and every muscle in his body seemed to relax.
‘Alex said that he and Dave saw you at the supermarket one day,’ Aileen continued. ‘They realized that someone was paying you to go shopping. Dave and Jimmy had started robbing old people in the street by this time, but they never got much money. Jimmy decided that the person you did the shopping for must have a lot of money hidden away somewhere to pay you with. He told the girl to try and find out from you where the house was.’
A spasm like a single shiver ran through the boy’s body. Then he was absolutely still again, the pulsing of an artery on his neck the only sign that he was still alive.
‘But before they could do anything, workmen arrived to demolish the house. Jimmy and Dave started to argue about what to do and how to divide up the money they thought they were going to get. Alex and Tracy went out to fetch something to drink. When they came back, Jimmy was lying on the floor. His face was all discoloured. Dave said that he’d had a heart attack. He told Alex to help him carry the body upstairs and hide it in a cupboard. When they got upstairs, Jimmy suddenly started to twitch, but Dave got a coat-hanger and twisted it around his neck. Then he and Alex hung the body up in the cupboard to hide it from the workmen.’
The Unit was swathed in mist as though in cotton wool. Normally you could hear the distant nois
e of traffic, but today they might have been somewhere deep in the country. Aileen’s efforts to make her voice calm and soothing made her sound, to her own ears at least, like a radio programme called Listen With Mother. Every afternoon she and her mother had sat down in front of the wireless set and listened to a well-modulated female voice telling stories about the doings of bunnies, ducks and teddies. While she listened, Aileen had studied the lighted panel at the top of the wireless, displaying the names of foreign cities: Moscow, Rome, Warsaw, Berlin, Tokyo. The world was vast and various, fascinating but utterly safe, populated by furry little creatures who might occasionally be just a little bit naughty. No wonder people go mad, she thought.
The only point at which Steven had seemed at all disturbed by her narrative had been when she mentioned the girl. Aileen noted that this might be a sensitive area, so she decided to skip the part of Alex’s story in which he described how Tracy had got the boy to reveal the address of the house he visited. Alex said that Steven had also told the girl that the man who lived there had a trunk filled with treasure which he kept in an upstairs room, but the police seemed to feel that this unlikely detail must have been invented by Alex to justify what happened next.
‘When you got home after your newspaper round that week,’ Aileen resumed, ‘Dave and Alex took you upstairs to the room where they’d hidden Jimmy’s body and locked you in. Then they all went to the house in Grafton Avenue. The girl kept watch in the street while Dave and Alex went to the door and rang the bell in a special way you’d talked about.’
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