The art of drowning, p.18
The Art of Drowning, page 18
‘It’s my father. Left me a message. He’s ill, or he wouldn’t leave a message at all.’
Part of Rachel wanted to ignore it. Then she remembered how he had looked when last she saw him. Old and grey. She had forgotten everything else. He was her father.
‘What exactly did he say?’
‘Something stupid. He said someone picked his pocket on the train. He must mean the other night, going home from us. Says he went to hospital.’
Ivy slumped against the door, then came and sat down beside Rachel.
‘On the train? Oh, poor thing,’ she said. ‘Are you sure he said the train? He didn’t say anything else?’
‘No.’
‘But he’s all right? He must be, surely, to phone at all.’
‘He probably is. It’s just that I can’t get the number he called from. I’ll have to go back and find out where he is. He’s not at home, probably at the neighbour’s and I don’t have the neighbour’s number with me. If he’s in hospital I don’t know which hospital. If I go now I’ll be back at the flat by nine. Sorry, sounds like I’m missing a party.’
Ivy handed her the wine. Rachel shook her head.
‘Wait until the morning and I’ll come with you,’ Ivy said.
‘Shit, I forgot that. How will you get back tomorrow without the car?’
Ivy put her arm around her. She felt hot from the sun and there was the dry sweetness of wine on her breath.
‘Same as I always do without you. Lift to the station, train. Are you sure he said he was pickpocketed on the train?’
‘Yes.’
‘The bastards. The fucking parasites,’ Ivy said, sounding somehow relieved, and then hesitated. ‘I could come with you now, if you like.’
Rachel felt grateful for that, but shook her head. She had heard the hesitation and that was enough.
Your father is yours, and mine is mine.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It turned out Blaker had been a country boy, once. Came from somewhere up north, territory unknown to Donald, who was London born and bred, although he could understand why someone might want to live anywhere else, the way it was now. He wasn’t a bad chap really, by which Donald meant he was interesting, he could talk, he was educated enough to have a nodding acquaintance with history, so therefore he passed. It did not make Donald approve of him, which was another matter, but in general he found thieves easier to understand than their more moral, less articulate counterparts.
All he had established that first time was that Blaker had the skill to threaten the judge in the way the judge had been threatened, and that by some weird coincidence he was enamoured of the judge’s ex-wife. The coincidence wasn’t so great when he considered the territory. The West End of London was still the uncomfortable but manageable refuge for runaways, thieves, opportunists, drug addicts, homeless drop-outs of all types and ages slipping through the social net. There was the official Centrepoint refuge in Tottenham Court Road, dumping ground for the displaced youth of several boroughs, there were the favourite places of shelter all around Charing Cross, with the warm underpasses for sleeping; there was the endless opportunity of casual, cash-paid labour; there were doorways and nearby hospitals and above all, millions of consumers. A person could live on what was dropped and left and a person could be paid to pick it up. Get to London, like Dick Whittington, because the pavements were paved with gold, flee inland from the coast, downhill from anywhere, get lost or found, and survive, for a while. Huddle together with kindred spirits, make friends and allies, or shun them. Celebrate a fresh misery or a win. Keep the cold out.
‘I reckon some of us blag our way out of the homeless shit out of sheer boredom,’ Blaker said. ‘Either that, or you lie down and die. I’ve known Ivy a long time. She was always going to rise, like a cork floating on the muck, because she had the will, and she never quite dropped out of the system. She had support. She chose the street. She shared stuff, though most of us don’t. I’d just got out of prison for the third time, back here like one of those bloody pigeons. Either here or down Embankment Gardens if the weather’s nice or I want a change. Ivy’s the same, but she has other places too. I saw her again when I was on bail for the last lot. Told her I’d come up in front of a German judge – is that what we fought the fucking war for? – but at least he gave me bail before the trial, and she said, You what? What was his name again? Then she laughed and laughed. Oh, he’s a judge now is he, now isn’t that rich? He wasn’t one of them when I was married to him. A fucking judge. You could have knocked me down with a feather and I laughed back at her, didn’t believe a word of it. Ivy doesn’t like being laughed at. Nor being pushed about, or touched. You’ve got to be careful about that. You have to give it to her. She worked her way out of it. Said it was the only way. She said if you don’t earn the money, someone’s going to take it away; if it’s nicked, they nick it back. I wish I’d listened, but work and me, we never got on. Now I’ve got no fucking choice, because I’ve lost my bottle for the other. She got me a job on a night shift.’
‘What sort of shift?’
Blaker looked at him scornfully.
‘There’s all sorts of shifts. Honestly, you people don’t know you’re born. There’s shifts for loading and unloading, shifts for cinemas, theatres, lavatories … when do you think they clean the shops? Pubs, clubs, shifts for packing sandwiches and scrubbing decks, gettit? A lot of them are sewn up, but they’ll always take Ivy. Pity she couldn’t have got me a job as a model, too. That’d be a treat for them.’
He sniggered with laughter at his own joke. Donald did the clichéd thing and got up and fetched another pint. They had not moved far from where they had first met. He was still smarting from his attempt to tell the judge his big discovery about the Blaker connection, storming up to his chambers at the right time of day, finding him out there on that bench. But the judge had been in a state at first, then cool and dismissive, listened and said, that’s fine, but don’t you need to know a little more? Has he admitted anything? I’m sure lots of people knew my wife. He had not liked his tête-à-tête with the girl on the bench interrupted. They had looked close; Carl had kept his eyes on her as she walked away, as if following a dream and wanting to run after her.
On second thoughts, he might have been right about Donald not knowing enough and getting overexcited about finding a connection which could be nothing. Yes, Blaker had said he would do anything for this Ivy woman, but so what? That was as far as he’d got, apart from establishing that Blaker was lonely enough to be up for a longer chat any time and seemed to have nothing but regret on his conscience. Thus, today, Donald was doing his policeman’s thing of buying pints for an old con and enjoying it. Saturday counted as overtime; Saturdays and Sundays were bad days for Blaker because there was less to watch. The pub in this street could have done with a spring-clean. They were like ladies, meeting for lunch, and Donald was resenting the money. Blaker could run just as well on coffee, not that the price was so different.
‘Don’t mind my asking,’ Donald began, ‘but you know after you mugged those girls, why did you phone them up? Why keep the keys? They’d have changed the locks. You were never going to go stalking, were you?’
Blaker shook his head.
‘It was something to do. I was bored. Made sense at the time. I liked the idea of the silly bitches being frightened. Remembering me when no one else would. Silly. And the keys were just an insurance against some time when I might have nowhere else to go. Gave me a kick, having keys and addresses, rainy-day insurance. And anyway, they wouldn’t all have changed the locks. It’s expensive. Ivy said she probably wouldn’t have bothered when she was married with a house of her own. It might have been worth a try sometime. Silly; it got me a bigger sentence from that bastard. I couldn’t believe it was him sending me down. Fucking Kraut. Because I knew all about him by then. How dare that fucker sit in judgement on me?’
Donald wanted to seize his thin shoulders and rattle him for information; instead he moved his feet on the sticky carpet and imagined rats in the cellar. The beer was warm, the heat outside stultifying. There was no point in hurrying anything.
‘Like I said, how dare he? All I’d ever done was steal from silly bitches who could easily afford it and it’s them gets the sympathy. Losing your fucking handbag won’t make a jot of difference the day after. What about the poor sod who’s got no other choice but to take it? Once you start, you’ve got to go on. Not like him, a fucking Hun judge, been given everything, with nothing taken away. Just like the Germans after the war, innit? They got everything, we got nothing, and who got rich? Them. Aside from all that, I couldn’t believe him being a bleeding judge, after what he’d done to her. He’s a fucking murderer, for God’s sake. I bloody told him what he was. Him sending me to prison? The cunt.’
Ah. That explained that.
‘Bit extreme, isn’t it?’ Donald suggested chattily. ‘Calling him a murderer. I mean, judges can’t actually hang you any more, even if they might like the idea. There’s probably some of them gagging for the chance to give out a death penalty, but they’re not allowed. Not since the sixties.’
He was recalling the irrelevant fact that the last public hanging was in 1868, abandoned after that for the avoidance of litter, public unrest, and the awkward dispersal of the thousands who gathered to watch. He wondered if they would now. Probably. Blaker had calmed down again. You could never make anyone tell you a story in chronological order. History was not like that either. The only consistent thing was that the most civilised of men remained savages, and women could be worse, and that Blaker personified an individual episode in the Industrial Revolution where men drifted into cities because there was no longer work on the land. Plus ça change.
‘Like I said,’ Blaker went on, ‘I didn’t believe her when she said she’d been married to the judge, even if he wasn’t one then. She told me all about her bastard old man. Never thought I’d meet him. Killed the kid and locked her out, he did. I thought she was making it up, but then we used to talk about lots of other stuff, like home. I worked on a farm, see, when I was a kid, would be now if there’d been a job; no, I lie, I wouldn’t, but I know how to bale straw and make silage and what pigs eat, all that shit, and so did Ivy. She wasn’t kidding, she knew what she was on about there, so I got to believe the rest of what she said about the marriage and him. I used to say to her, why don’t you just go home, and she’d say, why don’t you, and I’d say, there was nothing there to do when I left, why should there be now? And she said she’d never go back until she could hold her head up. But she did, because she could. She’s been good to me, Ivy.’
He sipped at the pint with great delicacy, making it last. Another thing about him Donald quite liked. He wasn’t greedy or demanding, except for someone to listen.
‘When I was on bail, the last time, all that shit about phone calls and keys coming down on my head, oh, when was that, three years ago now, I said to her, wouldn’t it be odd if it’s your old man in the judging seat again. There’s not that many to choose from, you can’t choose, it’s always the same bloody court you end up in. She was on the way up then, got a room; mind, Ivy always had a room if she wanted, and jobs and a modelling job, and said she was a student, but still she’d find me, somewhere near here, or down in the Gardens with the others. Not often, often enough to give me money if she had it. I don’t know when she told me that her old man had killed her daughter, and that’s why she hit rock bottom and got chucked out, that was long before. Couldn’t be seen wedded to a crackhead, could he, wanting to be a judge and all? Drowned her and killed her.’
‘Both?’ Donald said faintly.
‘That’s what she said. And chucked his wife out on the streets, I ask you. Makes her go mad, so no one will know what he’s done. The bastard. Hypocritical cunt. I was so fucking angry when he sent me down, I screamed at him. People should know.’
‘I don’t know how you can drown someone and kill them,’ Donald said.
‘Drowned her and shot her ghost, she said. Let’s go out, Don, whatever your name is. I need a view. I know all you coppers think drink’s the thing, but I need a view.’
They moved into the light and Blaker, totally unaffected by three pints, led the way. Donald followed him on to the hot pavement outside and felt disorientated by his own pint of gassy ale and the afternoon itself, found himself seeking the shady side of the street and dreaming of trees. Blaker led the way, Donald wondering if there was any greenery within a mile of here, or any place not thronged with people. They did not go far. Blaker was not seeking a rural view and was suddenly tired of him. He pointed to a café with tables outside in Wardour Street.
‘They used to let us sit outside here for hours when they were Italians,’ he said. ‘All day if we wanted. Now it’s fucking Starbucks, so I reckon it’ll be ten minutes max before they move us on. Want to bet?’
Donald did not even want to know about the sensation of being moved on. He left Blaker on the seat with a view of the newsagent’s on the other side of the road, a place famous for selling every newspaper under the sun, and came back with two bottles of overpriced water. Blaker ignored the offering and belched noisily.
‘We used to sit here and read the newspapers people left, still do, occasionally. Or at least, I’d read it and she’d ask me what I was reading. Ivy’s as clever as all get out, but she can scarce read, you know. Knew everything by heart, though, a real learner.’
He adjusted himself on the metal seat and stretched his legs, challenging anyone who passed by on the narrow, ungolden pavement to manoeuvre round him. Donald curled his own legs beneath the chair, adopting the habit of the nonconfrontational.
‘Ivy’d changed by the time I came out last time,’ Blaker said. ‘Cleaned up altogether, not that she wasn’t well on the way when I went in. Only person in my life I’ve ever worried about, or worried about me, for that matter. But you know what? It was always as if the more she cleaned up, the more she worked, the more she realised what had been done to her, and nothing was ever really going to cure it. Nothing could give her back those years. Couldn’t give me back either, not after he’d sent me to prison. Two years! For nicking handbags! I couldn’t be there for her then. She wanted to make him pay, she said, for what he’d done to both of us. And her mum and dad, and everyone else.’
‘Revenge, you mean?’
Blaker nodded. ‘Something like that. She said it would make her complete. Get her soul back. An eye for an eye. She said it would fix everything if he were dead. She hates him. It’s only natural, isn’t it?’
‘If you say so.’
Blaker was angry at that. He moved from voluble passivity to rage and back again in seconds, his voice rising to a shrill whine.
‘What’s natural to you, you daft bugger? How do you know? I bet you’ve never even seen grass grow, let alone anything edible.’
‘Sorry.’
The thread of narrative was running out; Donald could feel it slipping through his fingers and knew that if he pressed him now, he would only invent, as perhaps he was already. Giving him water had been tantamount to an insult; Donald knew he had no more bargaining power, no influence, nothing he could offer apart from company, no threat he could make.
‘Death to all lawyers,’ he said.
‘Too right,’ Blaker said. ‘Too bloody right.’
‘My wife says I’m a patronising git,’ Donald said. ‘But I think if she chucked me out, I might want to kill her.’
Blaker nodded sympathetically.
‘Used to think that myself, about the bloke I ran away from home for, but shit, I would have gone anyway, and they all leave in the end. You’re only going to get caught, so why bother? Since when was a fuck worth a lifetime in jail, and who’d get the sympathy vote? Him.’
The afternoon stretched before them. Like ladies who lunched, neither had better things to do, and the curiosity and mutual need which blossomed between them into mutual tolerance made Donald want to go as well as to stay, extend it or finish it, he was not quite sure which, but it was worth the gamble. He was wondering what his wife would think, and what she might have done if he had ever tried to part her from his daughters, yes, she would have killed him … Love was a many-splendoured thing. It was the gut ache he had now.
‘If you want to know how come I got out of prison so early, you could always ask,’ Blaker said.
‘I was curious. None of my business.’
‘I’m HIV positive, see? They don’t really like us hanging around. You might like to think of it before you give me a hug. Ivy doesn’t.’
Donald tried not to react.
‘Fancy a walk?’ he said. ‘I know I know fuck-all about the way the world works compared to you, but I do know another garden where you can sit for free. Supposed to be private, but it isn’t, not really. It’d take an hour at least before anyone moved you on.’
‘How come you’re not busy, copper? All those fucking murders I read about. That poor bastard in the ambulance, the other one outside the theatre … Shocking. What’s the world coming to?’
‘Rumour has it,’ Donald said, ‘that it’s better than it was.’
What a waste of time. She was more than halfway back when her father answered the mobile calls she made every ten minutes, and just as she neared London, they spoke. Yes, he was at his neighbour’s and very nice it was too, thank you. What was the problem? She was at the end of the motorway, mounting a three-lane slope which took her past the high-rise places where she would have hated to live, thinking, how do they do this, wanting to be by the lake, but not wanting, not capable of anything until she had heard his voice. She almost took the car off the road. The summer night had given way to near darkness, a sky beautiful and streaked with colours, magenta, blue, grey, purple, misled by artificial lights into a backdrop of marvels, the stage set for Act One of the night. Ten thirty, all at once in reach of home, and no reason to be there. He was fine, he said. No, he didn’t want her coming to see him right now. He’d had an attack on the train, had a day and a night in the hospital, which was more than anyone got these days. Should have gone home sooner. It was because of the crowds on the train, someone picking his pocket, taking the Ventolin and the pills, and it was hot and scary. He kept repeating that, like a litany. Oh yes, all right, if she was free she could come tomorrow, but there was really no need. He’d rather not. Yes, he had thought he was going to die, but he hadn’t, had he? He wanted to look better. Get back on the rails. Please. She thought of the crowds jostling that small man, the panic as he felt for his inhaler and the pills, and the humiliation, the hating of help, and she wanted to cry.
