Читать книгу The Four Last Things - Andrew Taylor, Andrew Taylor - Страница 6

‘I am naturally bashful; nor hath conversation, age, or travel, been able to effront or enharden me …’

Religio Medici, I, 40

Eddie called her Angel and so had the children. He knew the name pleased her but not why. Lucy Appleyard refused to call Angel anything at all. In that, as in so much else, Lucy was different.

Lucy Philippa Appleyard was unlike the others even in the way Angel chose her. It was only afterwards, of course, that Eddie began to suspect that Angel had a particular reason for wanting Lucy. Yet again he had been manipulated. The questions were: how much, how far back did it go – and why?

At the time everything seemed to happen by chance. Eddie often bought the Evening Standard, though he did not always read it. (Angel rarely read newspapers, partly because she had little interest in news for its own sake, and partly because they made her hands dirty.) Frank Howell’s feature on St George’s, Kensal Vale, appeared on a Friday. Angel chanced – if that was the appropriate word – to see it the following Tuesday. They had eaten their supper and Eddie was clearing up. Angel wanted to clean her shoes, a job which like anything to do with her appearance was too important to be delegated to Eddie.

She spread the newspaper over the kitchen table and fetched the shoes and the cleaning materials. There were two pairs of court shoes, one navy and the other black, and a pair of tan leather sandals. She smeared the first shoe with polish. Then she stopped. Eddie, always aware of her movements, watched as she pushed the shoes off the newspaper and sat down at the table. He put the cutlery away, a manoeuvre which allowed him to glance at the paper. He glimpsed a photograph of a fair-haired man in dog collar and denim jacket, holding a black baby in the crook of his left arm.

‘Wouldn’t like to meet him on a dark night,’ Eddie said. ‘Looks like a ferret.’ Imagine having him running up your trousers, he thought; but he did not say this aloud for fear of offending Angel.

She looked up. ‘A curate and a policeman.’

‘He’s a policeman, too?’

‘Not him. There’s a woman deacon in the parish. And she’s married to a policeman.’

Angel bent her shining head over the newspaper. Eddie pottered about the kitchen, wiping the cooker and the work surfaces. Angel’s stillness made him uneasy.

To break the silence, he said, ‘They’re not really like vicars any more, are they? I mean – that jacket. It’s pathetic.’

Angel stared at him. ‘It says they have a little girl.’

His attention sharpened. ‘The ferret?’

‘Not him. The curate and the policeman. Look, there’s a picture of the woman.’

Her name was Sally Appleyard, and she had short dark hair and a thin face with large eyes.

‘These women priests. If you ask me, it’s not natural.’ Eddie hesitated. ‘If Jesus had wanted women to be priests, he’d have chosen women apostles. Well, wouldn’t he? It makes sense.’

‘Do you think she’s pretty?’

‘No.’ He frowned, wanting to find words which Angel might want to hear. ‘She looks drab, doesn’t she? Mousy.’

‘You’re right. She’s let herself go, too. One of those people who just won’t make the effort.’

‘The little girl. How old is she? Does it say?’

‘Four. Her name’s Lucy.’

Angel went back to her shoes. Later that evening, Eddie heard her moving around the basement as he watched television in the sitting room above. It was over a year since he had been down there. The memories made him feel restless. He returned to the kitchen to make some tea. While he was there he reread the article about St George’s, Kensal Vale. He was not surprised when Angel announced her decision the following morning over breakfast.

‘Won’t it be dangerous?’ Eddie stabbed his spoon at the photograph of Sally Appleyard. ‘If her husband’s in the CID, they’ll pull out all the stops.’

‘It won’t be more dangerous if we plan it carefully. You’ve never really understood that, have you? That’s why you came a cropper before you met me. A plan’s like a clock. If it’s properly made it has to work. All you should need to do is wind it up and off it goes. Tick tock, tick tock.’

‘Are we all right for money?’

She smiled, a teacher rewarding an apt pupil. ‘I shall have to do a certain amount extra to build up the contingency fund. But it’s important not to break the routine in any way. I think I might warn Mrs Hawley-Minton that I may have some time off around Christmas.’

During the next two months, from mid-September to mid-November, Angel worked on average four days a week. Sometimes these included evenings and nights. Mrs Hawley-Minton’s agency was small and expensive. Word of mouth was all the advertising it needed. Most of the clients were either foreign business people or expatriates paying brief visits home. They were prepared to pay good money for reliable and fully qualified freelance nannies with excellent references and the knack of controlling spoiled children. The tips were good, in some cases extravagantly generous.

‘It’s a sort of blood money,’ Angel explained to Eddie. ‘It’s not that the parents feel grateful. They feel guilty. That’s because they’re not doing their duty – they’re leaving their children to be brought up by strangers. It’s not right, is it? Money can’t buy love.’

They were very busy. On the agency days, Angel took the tube down from Belsize Park and made her way to Westminster, Belgravia, Knightsbridge and Kensington. She looked very smart in her navy-blue outfit, her blonde hair tied back, the hem of her skirt swinging just below the knee. Mrs Hawley-Minton’s girls did not have a uniform – after all, they were ladies, not servants – but they were encouraged to conform to a discreetly professional house style. Meanwhile, Eddie saw to the cooking, the cleaning and most of the shopping.

In their spare time they made their preparations. For one thing, Angel insisted on repainting the basement, a refinement which Eddie thought unnecessary.

‘What’s the point? We only did it eighteen months ago.’

‘I want everything to be nice and fresh.’

They shared the outside research. Angel liked to say there was no such thing as useless knowledge. If you gathered all the information that could possibly be relevant, and tried to predict every contingency, then your plan could not fail. Working separately, they quartered the broad crescent of north London between Kentish Town in the east and Willesden Junction in the west. They went in the van, on foot and by public transport. Afterwards Angel would set little tests.

‘Suppose you’re travelling from Kensal Vale: it’s rush hour, and there are roadworks on Kilburn High Road, and you want to cut down to Maida Vale: what’s your best route?’

The riskier part of the research involved the surveillance of Lucy and her parents. Angel insisted that they be even more cautious than they had been on other occasions because of Michael Appleyard’s job. It was easier once they had worked out the geography of the Appleyards’ routine. Like the majority of Londoners, the Appleyards spent most of their lives at a handful of locations or travelling to and from them; their city was really an invisible village.

Angel spread out the map on the kitchen table. ‘Four main possibilities. St George’s, the flat in Hercules Road, the child minder’s house, Kensal Vale library.’

‘What about shops?’ Eddie put in. ‘She and her mother often go down West End Lane. And they’ve driven up to Brent Cross at least twice since we started.’

Angel shook her head. ‘I don’t like it. Too many video cameras around, especially at Brent Cross. Remember that boy Jamie. Jamie Bulger.’

That year a dank autumn slid imperceptibly into a winter characterized by cutting winds and relentless rain; pedestrians wrapped up warmly and hurried half-disguised along the pavements. On research trips Angel usually wore her long, hooded raincoat, often with the black wig and glasses.

‘It makes you look like a monk,’ Eddie said with a chuckle as she checked her appearance in the hall mirror one evening. ‘Or rather, a nun.’

She slapped him. ‘Don’t ever say that again, Eddie.’

He rubbed his tingling cheek and apologized, desperate as always for her forgiveness. However hard he tried, he sometimes managed to upset her. He hated himself for his clumsiness. It made everything so uncomfortable when Angel was upset.

Eddie worried about Angel going out alone in the evening. These days no one was safe on the streets of London, and beautiful women were more vulnerable than anyone. One night in October she returned home towards midnight with a torn coat, her colour high and the glasses missing. She told Eddie that a drunk had pawed her in Quex Road.

‘It was disgusting. It’s made me feel physically sick.’

‘But what happened?’ Eddie drew her towards the sitting room. For once the roles were reversed. He felt fiercely protective towards her. ‘How did you get away?’

‘Oh, that wasn’t a problem.’ She drew her right hand out of her pocket. Silver flashed before his eyes.

‘What is it?’ He looked more closely and frowned. ‘A scalpel?’

‘I cut open his hand and then his face. Then I ran. If people behave like animals, they have to be treated like animals.’

On another occasion they went together to St George’s and stared at the grubby red brick church with its sturdy spire and rain-washed slate roofs. Angel tried the door but it was locked. Eddie was surprised how angry this made her.

‘It’s terrible. They never used to lock churches when I was young. Not in the daytime.’

‘Did you go to church?’ Eddie asked, suddenly curious. ‘We didn’t.’

‘Didn’t you?’ Angel raised her eyebrows. ‘Shall we go?’

By the middle of November, Angel had decided that it would be best to take Lucy while she was in the care of the child minder. According to the Voters’ List, her name was Carla Vaughan. Angel summed up the woman with three adjectives: fat and vulgar and black.

‘You think it’ll be easier if we take her from there?’ Eddie asked.

‘Of course. The Vaughan woman takes far too many children. There’s no way she can keep track of them all the time.’

‘She was giving them sweets when they were at the library. I bet she doesn’t make them clean their teeth afterwards. And they were making a dreadful racket in there. She was almost encouraging it.’

‘She’s a disgrace,’ Angel said. ‘When she’s at home with them, she probably sits them in front of the television and feeds them chocolate to keep them quiet. I’m sure she hasn’t any professional qualifications.’

‘Lucy’ll be better off with us,’ Eddie said.

‘There’s no question of that. She’s just not a fit person to have charge of children.’

By the afternoon of Friday the twenty-ninth of November their preparations were almost complete. That was when Eddie acted on the spur of the moment; as so often, it seemed to him that he had no choice in the matter. The sense of his own helplessness outweighed even his fear of what Angel might say and do when she discovered what had happened.

Circumstances played into his hands – forced him to act. Rain, a cold dense blanket like animated fog, had been falling from a dark sky for most of the afternoon, persuading people to stay inside if they had any choice in the matter. At Angel’s suggestion, Eddie set out to explore the geography of Carla Vaughan’s neighbourhood.

The prospect of plodding through a dreary network of back streets between Kilburn and Kensal Vale would have been boring if it had not scared him so much. In his imagination, this part of London was populated almost exclusively by drug addicts, dark-skinned muggers, gangs of uncontrollable teenagers and drunken Irishmen with violent Republican sympathies.

Shivering at his own daring, he parked the van in the forecourt of a pub called the Rose of Connemara. With the help of a map he navigated his way through the streets around Carla’s house. Much of the housing consisted of late-Victorian terraces, with windows on or near the pavement. Lights were on in many of the windows. He glimpsed snug interiors, a series of vignettes illustrating lives which had nothing to do with him: a woman ironing, children watching television, an old man asleep in an armchair, a black couple dancing together, pelvis to pelvis, oblivious of spectators. He met few other pedestrians and none of them tried to mug him.

The way he found Lucy – no, the way Lucy came to him – seemed in retrospect little short of miraculous; if he believed in God he could have taken it as evidence of a divine providence hovering benignly over his affairs. He had been exploring an alley which ran between the back gardens of two terraces. One of the houses on his right was Carla’s, and he had carefully counted the gardens in order to establish which belonged to her. He saw no one, though at one point an Alsatian flung itself snarling against a gate as he passed.

He identified Carla’s house without trouble. The windows were of the same type as those at the front – UPVC frames with the glass patterned to imitate diamond panes; wholly out of period with the house but typical of the area and the sort of person who lived in it.

The little miracle, his present from Father Christmas, was waiting for him, her dark hair gleaming with pearl-like drops of rainwater.

‘It was Lucy’s fault,’ Eddie told Angel later. ‘She’s such a tease. She was asking for it.’

Angel was furious when they reached Rosington Road. She didn’t say much, not with Lucy there, but she suggested in an icy voice that Eddie might like to go to his room and wait there until she called him. Angel took Lucy to the basement. By that time Lucy had started to cry, which increased Eddie’s misery. It made him so sad when children were unhappy.

‘I’m too soft for my own good,’ he murmured to himself. ‘That’s my trouble.’

Eddie sat on his bed, hands clasped over his plump stomach, as though trying to restrain the sour ache inside from bursting out. On the wall opposite him was a picture, a brightly coloured reproduction in a yellowing plastic frame. It showed a small girl in a frothy pink dress; she had a pink bow in her dark hair, a mouth like a puckered cherry and huge eyes fringed with dark lashes. The picture had been a Christmas present to Eddie’s mother in 1969.

The girl, now seen through water, blurred and buckled. Oh God. Why don’t you help me? Stop this. There was no God, Eddie knew: and therefore no chance of help. He thought briefly of Lucy’s parents, the policeman and the deacon. Let the woman’s God console them. That was his job. In any case, Eddie was not responsible for the Appleyards’ pain. It had been Angel’s decision to take Lucy. So it was her fault, really, her fault and Lucy’s. Eddie had been no more than the agent, the dupe, the victim.

Time passed. Eddie would have liked to go down to the kitchen and make himself a drink. Better not – there was no point in upsetting Angel any further. He heard cars passing up and down Rosington Road and snatches of conversation from the pavement. The house itself was silent. The basement was soundproofed and Angel had not switched on the intercom.

‘Lucy,’ he said softly. ‘Lucy Philippa Appleyard.’

Eddie stared at the picture of the girl and stroked his soft little beard. He had been five that Christmas. Had the artist been lucky enough to have a real model, someone like Lucy? He remembered how his mother slowly unwrapped the picture and stared at it; how she picked a shred of tobacco from her lips and flicked it into the ashtray; how she stared across the hearthrug at his father, who had given her the picture. What he could not remember was whether she had spoken her verdict aloud, or whether he had merely imagined it.

‘Very nice, Stanley. If you like that sort of thing.’

What had Eddie’s father liked? If you asked different people you received different answers: for example, making dolls’ houses, taking artistic photographs and helping others less fortunate than himself. All these answers were true.

Stanley Grace spent most of his life working at the head office of Paladin Assurance. The company no longer existed – it had been gobbled up by a larger rival in one of the hostile takeovers of the late 1980s. In the days of its independence, the Paladin had been a womb-like organization which catered for all aspects of its employees’ lives. Eddie remembered Paladin holidays, Paladin Christmas cards, Paladin pencils, Paladin competitions and the Paladin Annual Ball. Stanley Grace bought 29 Rosington Road in 1961 with a mortgage arranged through the Paladin, and promptly insured the house, its contents, himself and his wife with Paladin insurance policies.

Eddie never discovered what his father actually did at Paladin. The relationship between his parents was equally mysterious. ‘Relationship’ was in fact a misleading word since it implied give and take, a movement from one to the other, a way of being together. Stanley and Thelma did not live together: they coexisted in the wary manner of animals from different species obliged by circumstances beyond their control to use the same watering hole.

Eddie remembered asking his mother when he was very young whether he was human.

‘Of course you are.’

‘And are you human, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Daddy?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. Of course he is. I wish you’d stop pestering me.’

Stanley was a large, lumbering man built like a bear. He towered over his wife. Thelma was skinny and small, less than five feet high, and she moved like a startled bird. She had a long and cylindrical skull to which features seemed to have been added as an afterthought. Her clothes were usually drab and a size or so too large for her; her cardigans and skirts were dappled with smudges of cigarette ash. (Until the last year of her life she smoked as heavily as her husband.) When, later in life, Eddie came across references to people wearing sackcloth, he thought of his mother.

She was nearly forty when Eddie was born, and Stanley was forty-seven. They seemed more like grandparents than parents. The boundaries of their lives were precisely defined and jealously guarded. Thelma had her headquarters in the kitchen, and her writ ran in the sitting room, the dining room and all the rooms upstairs. The basement was Stanley’s alone; he installed a five-lever lock on the door from the hall because, as he would say jocularly, if he left the basement door unlocked, the Little Woman would start dusting and tidying, and he wouldn’t be able to find anything. Stanley also had a controlling interest in the tiny paved area which separated the front of the house from the pavement, and in the wilderness at the back.

Gardening was not among Stanley’s hobbies and in his lifetime the back garden remained a rank and overgrown place, particularly at the far end, where an accidental plantation of elder, ash and buddleia had seeded itself many years before. Over the tops of the trees could be seen the upper storeys of a block of council flats, which Thelma said lowered the tone of the neighbourhood. At night the lighted windows of the flats reminded Eddie of the superstructure of a liner. He liked to imagine it forging its way across a dark ocean while the passengers ate, drank and danced.

As a child, Eddie had associated the tangle of trees with the sound of distant trains, changing in direction as the wind veered from Gospel Oak and Primrose Hill to Kentish Town and Camden Road. He heard their strange, half-animal noises more clearly than in the house or even in the street – the throbbing of metal on metal, the rush of air and sometimes a scream. When he was very young indeed, he half-convinced himself that the noises were made not by trains, but by dinosaurs who lay in wait for him among the trees or in the patch of wasteland on the other side of the fence.

Though Stanley had no time for gardening, he liked to stand outside on a summer evening while he smoked a cigarette. His head cocked, as if listening carefully to the rumble of the trains, he would gaze in the direction of the trees and sometimes his pale, sad face would look almost happy.

In those days, the late 1960s and early 1970s, Rosington Road was full of children. Most of the houses had been occupied by families, whereas nowadays many of them had been cut up into flats for single people and couples. There had been fewer cars, children played in the street as well as in the gardens, and everyone had known one another. Some of the houses had belonged to the same families since the street was built in the 1890s.

According to Thelma, the house had been Stanley’s choice. She would have preferred somewhere more modern in a nice leafy suburb with no blacks or council housing. But her husband felt that his leisure was too important to be frittered away on unnecessary travel and wanted to live closer to the City and the head office of the Paladin. The house was semi-detached, built of smoke-stained London brick, two storeys above a basement. The ground sloped down at the back, so the rear elevation was higher than the front. The other older houses in the road were also semi-detached, though the gaps between each pair and its neighbours were tiny. During the war the area had suffered from bomb damage. One bomb had fallen on the far end of the road and afterwards the council had cleared the ruins to make way for garages and an access road for blocks of flats, newly built homes for heroes, between Rosington Road and the railway line.

Adult visitors rarely came to the house. ‘I can’t abide having people here,’ said Thelma. ‘They make too much mess.’

When his mother went out, she would hurry along Rosington Road with her head averted from the windows, and her eyes trained on the kerb. When Eddie was young she would drag him along in her wake, her fingers digging into his arm. ‘We must get on,’ she would say with an edge of panic to her voice when he complained of a stitch. ‘There’s so much to do.’

Stanley was very different. As he was leaving home he picked up another persona along with his umbrella, hat and briefcase. He became sociable, even gregarious, as he strolled along Rosington Road on his way to the station. Given a choice, he walked slowly, his chest thrust out, his feet at right angles to each other, which gave his gait more than a suspicion of a waddle. As he progressed down the street, his white, round face turned from side to side, searching for people – for anyone, neighbour or stranger, adult or child.

“Morning. Lovely day. Looks like it’s going to last.’ He would beam even if it was raining, when his opening gambit was usually, ‘Well, at least this weather will be good for the garden.’

At the office Stanley had a reputation for philanthropy. For many years he was secretary to the Paladin Dependants Committee, an organization which provided small luxuries for the widows and children of former employees of the company. It was he who organized the annual outing to Clacton-on-Sea, and the week’s camping holiday, also once a year, which involved him taking a party of children for what he called ‘a spot of fresh air under canvas’.

Eddie never went on these outings. ‘You wouldn’t enjoy it,’ Thelma told him when he asked to go. ‘Some of the children come from very unfortunate backgrounds. Last year there was a case of nits. Do you know what they are? Head lice. Quite disgusting.’ As for his mother, Eddie found it impossible to imagine her in a tent. The very idea was essentially surreal, a yoking of incongruities like a goat in a sundress – or indeed like the marriage of Stanley and Thelma Grace.

His parents shared a bedroom but to all intents and purposes there might have been a glass wall between them. Then why had they stayed together at night? There was a perfectly good spare bedroom. Thelma and Stanley must have impinged on each other in a dozen different ways: her snoring, his trips to the lavatory; her habit of reading into the early hours, his rising at six o’clock and treading ponderously across the room in search of his clothes and the contents of his pockets.

Loneliness? Was that the reason? It seemed such an inadequate answer to such a complicated question.

As it happened, Stanley enjoyed his own company. He spent much of his time in the basement.

The stairs from the hall came down to a large room, originally the kitchen, at the back of the house. Two doors opened from it – one to the former coal cellar, and the other to a dank scullery with a quarry-tiled floor. Because of the lie of the land, the scullery and coal cellar were below ground level at the front of the house. A third door had once given access to the back garden, but Stanley screwed this to its frame in the interests of security.

The basement smelled of enamel paint, turpentine, sawdust, photographic chemicals, cigarettes and damp. Always good with his hands, Stanley built a workbench across the rear wall under the window overlooking the garden. He glued cork tiles to the wall to make a notice board on which he pinned an ever-changing selection of photographs and also a plan of the dolls’ house he was working on. He kept freestanding furniture to a minimum – a stool for use at the workbench; a two-seater sofa where he relaxed; and a low Victorian armchair with a button back and ornately carved legs. (The latter appeared and reappeared in many of Stanley’s photographs, usually with one or more occupants.)

Finally, there was the tall cupboard built into the alcove on the left of the chimney breast. It had deep, wide shelves and was probably as old as the house. Stanley secured it with an enormous padlock.

In the early days, the basement was forbidden territory to Eddie (and even later he entered it only by invitation). Usually the door was closed but once, as he passed through the hall, Eddie noticed that it was half-open. He crouched and peered down the stairs. Stanley was standing at the workbench examining a photograph with a magnifying glass.

His father turned and saw him. ‘Hello, Eddie. I think Mummy’s in the kitchen.’ With the magnifying glass still in his hand he came towards the stairs, smiling widely in a way that made his cheeks bunch up like a cat’s. ‘Run along, now. There’s a good boy.’

Eddie must have been five or six. He was not usually a bold boy – quite the reverse – but this glimpse of the unknown room had stimulated his curiosity. In his mind he cast about for a delaying tactic. ‘That door, Daddy. What’s the padlock for?’

The smile remained fixed in place. ‘I keep dangerous things in the cupboard. Poisonous photographic chemicals. Very sharp tools.’ Stanley bent down and brought his cat’s smile very close to Eddie. ‘Think how dreadful it would be if there were an accident.’

Eddie must have been about the same age when he overheard an episode which disturbed him, though at the time he did not understand it. Even as an adult he understood it only partly.

It happened during a warm night in the middle of a warm summer. In summer Eddie dreaded going upstairs because he knew it would take him longer than usual to go to sleep. Pink and sweating, he lay in bed, holding a soft toy, vaguely humanoid but unisex, whom he called Mrs Wump. As so often happens in childhood, time stretched and stretched until it seemed to reach the borders of eternity. Eddie stroked himself, trying to imagine that he was stroking someone else – a cat, perhaps, or a dog; at that age he would have liked either. His palms glided over the curve of his thighs and slipped between his legs. He slid into a waking dream involving Mrs Wump and a soft, cuddly dog.

The noises from the street diminished. His parents came upstairs. As usual his door was ajar; as usual neither of them looked in. He was aware of them following their usual routine – undressing, using the bathroom, returning to their bedroom. Some time later – it might have been minutes or even hours – he woke abruptly.

‘Ah – ah –’

His father groaned: a long, creaking gasp unlike any other noise Eddie had heard him make; an inhuman, composite sound not unlike those he associated with the distant trains. Silence fell. This was worse than the noise had been. Something was very wrong, and he wondered if it could somehow be his fault.

A bed creaked. Footsteps shuffled across the bedroom floor. The landing light came on. Then his mother spoke, her voice soft and vicious, carrying easily through the darkness.

‘You bloody animal.’

One reason why Eddie liked Lucy Appleyard was because she reminded him of Alison. The resemblance struck him during the October half-term, when Carla took Lucy and the other children to the park. Eddie followed at a distance and was lucky enough to see Lucy on one of the swings.

Alison was only a few months younger than Eddie. But when he had known her she could not have been much older than Lucy was now. The girls’ colouring and features were very different. The resemblance lay in how they moved, and how they smiled.

Eddie did not even know Alison’s surname. When he was still at the infants’ school at the end of Rosington Road, she and her family had taken the house next door on a six-month lease. She had lived with her parents and older brother, a rough boy named Simon.

The father made Alison a swing, which he hung from one of the trees at the bottom of their garden. One day, when Eddie was playing in the thicket at the bottom of the Graces’ garden, he discovered that there was a hole in the fence. One of the boards had come adrift from the two horizontal rails which supported them. The hole gave Eddie a good view of the swing, while the trees sheltered him from the rear windows of the houses.

Alison had a mass of curly golden hair, neat little features and very blue eyes. In memory at least, she usually wore a short, pink dress with a flared skirt and puffed sleeves. When she swung to and fro, faster and faster, the air caught the skirt and lifted it. Sometimes the dress billowed so high that Eddie glimpsed smooth thighs and white knickers. She was smaller than Eddie, petite and alluringly feminine. If she had been a doll, he remembered thinking, he would have liked to play with her. In private, of course, because boys were not supposed to play with dolls.

Eddie enjoyed watching Alison. Gradually he came to suspect that Alison enjoyed being watched. Sometimes she shifted her position on the swing so that she was facing the hole in the fence. She would sing to herself, making an elaborate pretence of feeling unobserved; at the time even Eddie knew that the pretence was not only a fake but designed to be accepted as such. She made great play with her skirt, allowing it to ride up and then smoothing it fussily over her legs.

Memory elided the past. The sequence of events had been streamlined; inessential scenes had been edited out, and perhaps some essential ones as well. He remembered the smell of the fence – of rotting wood warmed by summer sunshine, of old creosote, of abandoned compost heaps and distant bonfires. Somehow he and Alison had become friends. He remembered the smooth, silky feel of her skin. It had amazed him that anything could be so soft. Such softness was miraculous.

Left to himself, Eddie would never have broken through the back fence. There were two places behind the Graces’ garden, both of which were simultaneously interesting and frightening, though for different reasons: to the right was the corner of the plot on which the council flats had been built; and to the left was the area known to adults and children alike as Carver’s, after the company which had owned it before World War II.

The council estate was too dangerous to be worth investigating. The scrubby grass around the blocks of flats was the territory of large dogs and rough children. Carver’s contained different dangers. The site was an irregular quadrilateral bounded to the north by the railway and to the south by the gardens of Rosington Road. To the east were the council flats, separated from Carver’s by a high brick wall topped with broken glass and barbed wire. To the west it backed on to the yards behind a terrace of shops at right angles to the railway. The place was a labyrinth of weeds, crumbling brick walls and rusting corrugated iron.

According to Eddie’s father, Carver’s had been an engineering works serving the railway, and during a wartime bombing raid it had received a direct hit. In the playground at Eddie’s school, it was widely believed that Carver’s was haunted by the ghost of a boy who had died there in terrible, though ill-defined, circumstances.

One morning Eddie arrived at the bottom of the Graces’ garden to find Alison examining the fence. On the ground at her feet was a rusting hatchet which Eddie had previously seen in the toolshed next door; it had a tall blade with a rounded projection at the top. She looked up at him.

‘Help me. The hole’s nearly large enough.’

‘But someone might see us.’

‘They won’t. Come on.’

He obeyed, pushing with his hands while she levered with the hatchet. He tried not to think of ghosts, parents, policemen and rough boys from the council flats. The plank, rotting from the ground up, cracked in two. Eddie gasped.

‘Ssh.’ Alison snapped off a long splinter. ‘I’ll go first.’

‘Do you think we should?’

‘Don’t be such a baby. We’re explorers.’

She wriggled head first into the hole. Eddie followed reluctantly. A few yards from the fence was a small brick shed with most of its roof intact. Alison went straight towards it and pushed open the door, which had parted company with one of its hinges.

‘This can be our place. Our special place.’

She led the way inside. The shed was full of rubbish and smelled damp. On the right was a long window which had lost most of its glass. You could see the sky through a hole in the roof. A spider scuttled across the cracked concrete floor.

‘It’s perfect.’

‘But what do you want it for?’ Eddie asked.

She spun round, her skirt swirling and lifting, and smiled at him. ‘For playing in, of course.’

Alison liked to play games. She taught Eddie how to do Chinese burns, a technique learned from her brother. They also had tickling matches, all the more exciting because they had to be conducted in near silence, in case anyone heard. The loser, usually Eddie, was the one who surrendered or who was the first to make a noise louder than a whisper.

There were other games. Alison, though younger than Eddie, knew many more than he did. It was she who usually took the lead. It was she who suggested the Peeing Game.

‘You don’t know it?’ Her lips formed an O of surprise, behind which gleamed her milk-white teeth and tip of her tongue. ‘I thought everyone knew the Peeing Game.’

‘I’ve heard about it. It’s just that I’ve never played it.’

‘My brother and I’ve been playing it for years.’

Eddie nodded, hoping she would not expose his ignorance still further.

‘We need something to pee into.’ Alison took his assent for granted. ‘Come on. There must be something in here.’

Eddie glanced round the shed. He was embarrassed even by the word ‘pee’. In the Grace household the activity of urination was referred to, when it was mentioned at all, by the euphemism ‘spending a penny’. His eye fell on an empty jam jar on a shelf at the back of the shed. The glass was covered on both sides with a film of grime. ‘How about that?’

Alison shook her head, and the pink ribbons danced in her hair. ‘It’s far too small. I can do tons more than that. Anyway, it wouldn’t do. The hole’s too small.’ Something of Eddie’s lack of understanding must have shown in his face. ‘It’s all right for you. You can just poke your willy inside. But with girls it goes everywhere.’

Curiosity stirred in Eddie’s mind, temporarily elbowing aside the awkwardness. He picked up a tin. ‘What about this?’

Alison examined it, her face serious. The tin was about six inches in diameter and had once contained paint. ‘It’ll do.’ She added with the air of one conferring a favour, ‘You can go first.’

His muscles clenched themselves, as they did when he was about to step into cold water.

‘Boys always go first,’ Alison announced. ‘My brother Simon does.’

There seemed no help for it. Eddie turned away from her and began to unbutton the flies of his khaki shorts. Without warning she appeared in front of him. She was carrying the paint tin.

‘You have to take your trousers and pants down. Simon does.’

He hesitated. His lower lip trembled.

‘It’s only a game, stupid. Don’t be such a baby. Here – I’ll do it.’

She dropped the tin with a clatter on the concrete floor. Brisk as a nurse, she undid the snakeskin buckle of his elasticated belt, striped with the colours of his school, green and purple. Before he could protest, she yanked down both the shorts and his Aertex pants in one swift movement. She stared down at him. He was ashamed of his body, the slabs of pink babyish fat that clung to his belly and his thighs. A boy at the swimming baths had once said that Eddie wobbled like a jelly.

Still staring, Alison said, ‘It’s smaller than Simon’s. And he’s a roundhead.’

To his relief, Eddie understood the reference: Simon was circumcised. ‘I’m a cavalier.’

‘I think I like cavaliers better. They’re prettier.’ She scooped up the tin. ‘Go on – pee.’

She held out the tin. Eddie gripped his penis between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, shut his eyes and prayed. Nothing happened. In normal circumstances he would have had no trouble in going because his bladder was full.

‘If you’re going to take all day, I might as well go first.’ Alison glared at him. ‘Honestly. Simon never has any trouble.’

She placed the tin on the floor, pulled down her knickers and squatted. A steady stream of urine squirted into the can. She raised the hem of her dress and examined it, as though inspecting the quality of the stitching. So that was what girls looked like down there, Eddie thought, still holding his penis; he had often wondered. He craned his neck, hoping for a better view, but Alison smiled demurely and rearranged her dress.

‘If you keep on rubbing your willy, it goes all funny. Did you know?’ Alison raised herself from the tin and pulled up her knickers. ‘At least, Simon’s does. Look – I’ve done gallons.’

Eddie looked. The tin was about a quarter full of liquid the colour of pale gold. Until now he had assumed that he was shamefully unique in having a penis which sometimes altered shape, size and consistency when he touched it; he had hoped that he might grow out of it.

‘It’s nearly half-full. I bet you can’t do as much.’

As Eddie glanced towards Alison, he thought he caught a movement at the window. When he looked there was no one there, just a branch waving in the breeze.

‘What did I tell you? It’s going stiff.’

Eddie was still holding his penis – indeed, his fingers had been absent-mindedly massaging it.

‘Empty my pee outside the shed,’ Alison commanded. ‘Then you can try again.’

Eddie realized suddenly how absurd he must seem with his shorts and pants around his knees. He pulled them up quickly, buttoned his flies and fastened his belt.

‘I don’t know why you’re bothering to do yourself up. You’ll only have to undo it all again.’

He went outside the shed and emptied the can under a bush. The tin was warm. The liquid ran away into the parched earth. It didn’t look or smell like urine. He wondered what it would taste like. He pushed the thought away – disgusting – and straightened up to return to the shed, his mind full of the ordeal before him. For an instant he thought he smelled freshly burned tobacco in the air.

Eddie and Alison played the Peeing Game on many occasions, and each time they explored a little further.

Fear of discovery heightened the pleasure. When they went into Carver’s, there was often a woman on the balcony of one of the council flats. The balcony overlooked both Carver’s and the garden of 29 Rosington Road. Sometimes the woman was occupied – hanging washing, watering plants; but on other occasions she simply stood there, very still, and watched the sky. Alison said the woman was mad. Eddie worried that she might see them and tell their parents that they were trespassing in Carver’s. But she never did.

Eddie’s memories of the period were patchy. (He did not like to think too hard about the possibility that he had willed this to be so.) He must have been six, almost seven, which meant that the year was 1971. It had been summertime, the long school holidays. He remembered the smell of a faded green short-sleeved shirt he often wore, and the touch of Alison’s hand, plump and dimpled, on his bare forearm.

The end came in September, and with shocking suddenness. One day Alison and her family were living at number 27, the next day they were gone. On the afternoon before they left, she told Eddie that they were moving to Ealing.

‘But where’s Ealing?’ he wailed.

‘How do I know? Somewhere in London. You can write me letters.’

Eddie cried when they parted. Alison forgot to leave her address. She slipped away from him like a handful of sand trickling through the fingers.