Читать книгу Ben, in the World - Doris Lessing - Страница 7

He walked along a street – rather, his feet were taking him up this street, past theatres and eating places – and he was on the side he usually avoided, crossing over before he came to a certain forbidden pavement. This time he did not cross over. He stood outside the theatre which frightened him when it was noisy and full of people, and stood on an empty pavement looking across at a little street where there was a doorway. This was a forbidden place. It was morning, and the cars that worked from the cubbyhole in the wall that called itself Super Universal Cabs were not there yet. They came in from early afternoon onwards. The man who organised these cabs, standing outside his cubbyhole, saying, ‘Take them to Camberwell… Swiss Cottage… Notting Hill… ’ was not there. This man was what Ben feared. It was he who had said, ‘Fuck off and don’t come back.’ His name was Johnston and he was Rita’s friend.

Some weeks ago, before Mrs Biggs had found him in the supermarket, he had been walking up this pavement, as usual alert for trouble, when he saw a woman in that doorway – that one, next to Super Universal Cabs. She had smiled at him. He followed the smile, went up narrow stairs behind her, and found himself in a room that he knew was poor and ugly, because he was contrasting it with what he remembered of his home, when he still had one, with his mother. The woman, though she was really a girl, for her make-up and big bruised-looking eyes made her look older, stood facing him, her hand on her belt, ready to take it off. She said, ‘How long?’

Ben had no idea what she meant, but stood with his teeth bared – this was his scared grin, not the friendly one – and did not reply.

‘Ten pounds for a blow job, forty for the whole hog.’

‘I don’t have any money,’ said Ben.

She came over, and put her hands down into his pockets, one on either side, more out of exasperation because of the preposterousness of this customer, than expectation, and at this Ben’s sexual nature, which he kept down, like all his other impermissible hungers, leaped up, and he gripped her by her shoulders, turned her around and, holding her fast, bent her so that she had to put her hands on the bed for support. He tugged up her skirt with one hand, pulled down her knickers, and took her from behind, short, sharp and violent. He had his teeth in her neck, and as he came he let out a grunting bark, like nothing she had ever heard before. He let her go, and she straightened up, flinging her pale hair off her face and stood looking at his face, then down at his thighs, the hairy thighs. She was not exactly unfamiliar with such hairiness – she had jested with Johnston that some of the men that came to her were like chimpanzees – but it was as if she were trying to find out from those strong furry legs just why this customer was so different. That query, that inspection, not hostile, had something in it that made him again grasp her, bend her over and begin again. He was starved for sex, had been hungry for it a long time, and just as if he had not so recently finished his first bout, his teeth went into her neck and she heard the triumphant grunting bark.

‘Just a minute,’ she said. ‘Just wait a minute.’

She pushed him so that he sat on the bed, and she sat on a chair opposite him. She needed time. This experience – a rape, that was what it amounted to – ought to be making her feel angry, and full of the contempt that she usually felt for her customers, but she had been thrilled by that double rape, the great powerful hands gripping her shoulders, the teeth in her neck, and, above all, the grunt like a roar. She was sitting feeling where his teeth had bitten, but could not find an abrasion. She took out a tiny mirror from her bag, and craned her neck to see – no, the skin was not broken, but it was bruised, and there would be questions from Johnston.

What Ben wanted was to lie on that narrow bed, beside her, and go to sleep. He was thinking hard. When he was the leader of the gang of boys, the bad boys that everyone was afraid of, there had been girls, and one liked him. She had tried to change him saying, ‘But Ben, let’s try it this way, turn round, it’s not nice what you do, it’s like animals.’ And he had indeed tried, but could not do what she wanted, for when he was face to face with her the raging angry need to possess and dominate was silent. It came to this – that if they were to do it, then it had to be his way, and soon she resented and even hated him for it. After some attempts she would not see him again, and the word had gone around among the girls that Ben was funny, there was something not quite right with him.

With this girl, Rita, he knew she liked him, and had liked what he did.

A bell rang, or rather hummed from the wall. This was a signal that there was a customer, and that Johnston was downstairs, and in control. She got up, pressed the bell, and said to Ben, ‘You’ve got to go now.’

‘Why?’ he said. He had not understood at all. He only knew she liked him.

‘Because I say so,’ she said, as if to a child, thinking that she could not remember talking to a customer like this before. ‘Go away.’ And then she added, ‘If you like, you can come again – in the morning, mind you.’ And she pushed him out of the room, and he went down her ugly stairs, zipping himself up, as men so often did on them.

On the pavement a tall rough-looking man took a good sharp look at him, and then looked again – people always looked again.

That was his first visit to Rita and next morning he had gone again. Meanwhile she had told Johnston about him. They were lying on her bed, smoking, very late, after all the minicab custom had ceased. He was her protector, and took a cut, but was not jealous, and was even good to her in a casual careless way. He had examined the bruised places on her neck: teeth marks were visible. He had heard a detailed account of the sex. This was because she wanted to talk about it, he was usually not interested. She had told him it hadn’t been like being with a man, more like an animal. ‘You know, like dogs.’

‘But you like him,’ Johnston had said, so that she should mark it and remember that he knew. He was feeling something he believed was not jealousy, more curiosity.

The second occasion was like the first. This time he did it once and she was disappointed, though she could hardly admit this to herself, since she was committed to the creed that her customers left her cold. That roaring triumphant grunt just above her head, the feeling of being helpless in those great hairy hands, the violence of the penetration – well, it thrilled her, but it was too short. She told him so. This was not like being told by that schoolgirl to lie face to face and then, kisses. He understood what she was saying, with his mind at least, and he let his trousers drop, and allowed her to manipulate him. Because this act was so soon after the first, he managed to keep going, and listened to her cries, with curiosity and surprise. But he was pleased, that he pleased her.

Meanwhile, he had no money. Literally, did not have the price of a meatburger, his favourite food. She gave him enough money to eat. It was summer and at night he found a bench or a hallway. She made him wash in her little bathroom. She cut his beard. This went on for about a month and then Johnston found out she was giving him money and said, ‘Now, that’s enough, Reet.’

She had become addicted to Ben and his animal ways and did not want to stop. She told a girlfriend, a whore in the next street, about Ben, and took Ben to that room, another poor dingy place, like Rita’s. This woman liked what Ben did, though he would have preferred to stay with Rita, and she gave him a couple of quid for his services. But her protector or boyfriend was not complacent, like Johnston, and when he found out told her Ben was not to come near her again. Johnston and he knew each other, and together they warned and threatened Ben.

And so Ben stopped going to Rita, and if he was in that street was careful to stay on the other side, and if he saw Rita, hurried away. It was not being beaten up he feared, for he was sure he could manage Johnston and the other one even if they both came at him together. It was being noticed, drawing attention to himself – that he mustn’t do.

A week after that he was seen by Mrs Biggs in the supermarket.

And now, because this was the other place in the world he could go to, and be welcomed with a smile, he made himself cross the tiny street, past Super Universal Cabs, and go up those stairs. The door was closed. He had learned about knocking, because she might have someone else there, but now he let out a shout, like a bull’s bellow, and at once the door opened and she pulled him in, slamming the door and locking it.

Rita had been angry with Johnston for sending Ben off. She had reminded him that their agreement was that she would please herself with her customers. The amounts of money she had given Ben were peanuts, nothing compared to what she earned in a day. If that ever happened again – then he should watch out. Johnston knew this was no useless threat. Johnston did not deal only in minicabs, and she knew what he got up to – or thought she did. One word from her to the police – the worst that could happen to her was a fine, and anyway, the police knew about her. She had customers among them. Johnston trusted her, had told her much more than was prudent. Rita, if not the proverbial tart with a heart of gold, was sensible, shrewd, affectionate, and gave him good advice.

Within a minute of arriving in Rita’s room, they were at it, and he was like a starved thing. Then, remembering her demands, at once did it again so that she could get her pleasure. And then she said, falling on the bed and pulling him down, ‘Where have you been, Ben?’

‘He said I shouldn’t come here.’

‘But I say you can. In the mornings.’

It all started again. He came every morning, and she gave him enough money to eat, and Johnston cross-examined her. ‘Why do you like him, Reet? I don’t get it.’

She didn’t get it either, though she thought enough about Ben. She was not an instructed young woman – or girl, for in fact she was not yet eighteen, Ben’s age – but the subject of his age had not come up. She thought he was probably about thirty-five: she liked older men, she knew.

One of the things they had in common, though they did not know it, was that both had had such a hard childhood. She had left school and run away to London from bad parents, had stolen money, been a thief for a while, and then talked the landlord of the building that housed the minicab firm and this tart’s room up the stairs into letting her have the room when the previous girl left. She was persuasive. She impressed. She had learned that she usually got her way with people. She had met many different kinds, but nothing like Ben. He was outside anything she had been told about, or seen on the television, or knew from experience. When she saw him naked for the first time, she thought, Wow! That’s not human. It was not so much the hairiness of him, but the way he stood, his big shoulders bent – that barrel chest – the dangling fists, the feet planted apart… She had never seen anything like him. And then there were the barking or grunting roars as he came, the whimpers in his sleep – yet if he wasn’t human, what was he? A human animal, she concluded, and then joked with herself, Well, aren’t we all?

Johnston did not interfere again, but he was waiting for some opportunity he could turn to his advantage. It came. Ben asked Rita to go with him ‘to the place where you get birth certificates’. Rita, familiar with the world of casual work, asked why didn’t he try ‘to work casual’ and the story of the building site came out. Her first reaction was that if anyone cheated Ben then Johnston could sort him out – but knew this would not happen. She asked where Ben had got it into his head he must have a birth certificate, heard about the old woman who said it would help get him unemployment benefit. ‘And then what?’ Rita asked, really curious about what unnecessarily lawful plans might be fermenting in that shaggy head.

Talking to Johnston, Rita mentioned that Ben wanted a birth certificate so that with it he could enter the world of proper work and unemployment benefit. Johnston saw his chance. He stopped Ben next time he emerged from Rita’s room, and said to him, ‘I want to talk to you,’ and as Ben crouched, his fists already clenched up, ‘No, I’m not warning you off Reet, I can help you get your papers.’

Now Johnston went back up the stairs to Rita’s, and for the first time the three of them were together in that room, Johnston and Rita sitting side by side on the bed, smoking, while Ben uneasily waited on the chair, wondering if this were a trap, and Rita had turned against him. He was trying to understand.

‘If you have a passport then you don’t need a birth certificate,’ said Johnston.

Ben did know that passports were what people took with them abroad. There had been a trip to France, his father with the other children, while he stayed with his mother. He could not go with them, because he couldn’t behave as they did.

He said he didn’t want to go anywhere, only a paper he could take to the office where – he described it, as a place where people were behind glass walls, and in front of them lines of other people waited for money. It took a long time for him to understand Johnston. In return for a passport, which Johnston could get from ‘a friend who does passports’, he, Ben, would make a trip to France, taking something with him Johnston wanted to give another friend, probably in Nice, or Marseilles.

‘And then shall I come back?’

Johnston had no intention of encouraging Ben to come back. He said, ‘You could stay there a bit and enjoy yourself.’

Ben saw from Rita’s face that she did not like this, though she did not say anything. The idea that he would possess something that he could keep in his pocket, and show a policeman, or a foreman on a building site, persuaded Ben, and he went with Johnston to the machine in the Underground where appeared five little photographs, that Johnston took off with him. The passport, when he was given it, surprised Ben. He was thirty-five years old, it said. He was a film actor: Ben Lovatt. His home address was somewhere in Scotland. Johnston was going to keep this passport ‘for safety’ but Ben demanded it to show the old woman. Yes, he said, he would bring it back at once.

When he stood outside Mrs Biggs’ door he knew the place was empty: he could sense that there was nothing alive in there. He did not knock, but knocked on the neighbour’s door, and heard the cat miaow. He had to knock again, and then at last she came to the door, saw him, and said, ‘Mrs Biggs is in hospital. I’ve got her cat with me.’ Ben had already turned to go off down the stairs, when she said, ‘She’d like it if you visited her, Ben.’

He was appalled: a hospital was everything he feared most, a big building, full of noise and people, and of danger for him. He remembered going to doctors with his mother. Every one of them had had that look. The neighbour understood that he was afraid. She and Mrs Biggs had discussed Ben, knew how hard it was for him to inhabit ordinary life – knew for instance that Ben would go down flight after flight of stairs because the lift so intimidated him.

She said, kindly, ‘Don’t worry, Ben, I’ll tell her you came to see her.’ Then she said, ‘Wait… ’ Left him standing there, returned with a ten-pound note, which she slipped into his breast pocket. ‘Look after yourself, Ben,’ she said, as the old woman would have done.

Ben made his way back to Rita’s. He was thinking about kindness, how it was some people saw him – that was how he put it – really did see him, but were not put off, it was as if they took him into themselves – that was how it felt. And Rita? Yes, she was kind, she felt for him. But not Johnston: no. He was an enemy. And yet there in Ben’s pocket was a passport, with his name in it, and an identity. He was Ben Lovatt, and he belonged to Great Britain which for him until now had been words, a sound, nothing real. Now he felt as if arms had been put around him.

Meanwhile, Rita and Johnston had been quarrelling. She said she didn’t like it, what Johnston was doing to Ben. What would happen to him in France? He couldn’t speak the language. He could only just cope with things here. Johnston had ended the argument with, ‘Don’t you see, Reet, he’ll end up behind bars anyway.’ He meant prison, but Rita heard something else, which in fact Johnston had mentioned during a discussion about Ben: one day the scientists would get their hands on Ben. Rita shrieked at Johnston that he was cruel. She insisted that Ben was nice, he was just a bit different from other people, that’s all.

When Ben arrived back in Rita’s room, he interrupted this quarrel. In both their minds was the word ‘bars’, both imagined cages. Johnston did not care what happened to this freak, but Rita was crying. If ‘they’ got Ben in a cage, he would roar and shout and bellow, and they would have to hit him or drug him, oh yes, she knew how life was, how people were, what one could expect.

Ben sat with his passport in his hand, reluctant to give it back to Johnston, and looked under his deep brows at them and knew it was him they had been quarrelling about. In his family they argued about him all the time. But more than by this angry atmosphere, he was being bothered by the many odours in the room. It smelled of her, the female, but he did not mind that, it was what emanated from Johnston that was making him want to fight or run away. It was a strong, dangerous male smell, and Ben always knew when Johnston had been on the pavement downstairs, or listening on the stairs, to keep a check on Rita. There were a variety of chemical traces in the air, as sharply differentiated from human ones as traffic stinks from the meat smells coming on to a pavement outside a takeaway. He wanted to get up and go, but knew he must not, until this business was settled. Rita was trying to stop Johnston from doing something.

Rita said to Johnston that he should try and get Ben a job, and ‘look after him’.

‘Meaning?’ said Johnston.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I can’t stop some bloke tripping him up on a dark night or pushing him under a bus. He upsets people, Reet. You know that.’

‘Perhaps he could be one of your drivers?’

‘Oh, come on, you’re dreaming.’

But now Rita took the passport from Ben, and said she would look after it, and put it into a drawer. Down they went to the cars, which were inserted here and there among the ordinary parked cars.

‘Get in,’ said Johnston to Ben, opening the door. Ben looked at Rita – Is this all right? – and she nodded. Ben got in behind the driving wheel and at once his face was all delight, exultation. He was thinking of the great glittering roaring accelerating motorbikes that had been the one joy of his life, like nothing else he had known. And now he was behind a wheel, and could put his hands on it, moving it this way and that. He was making a noise like Brrrr, Brrrr, and laughing.

Johnston pulled Rita into the scene with a hitch of his shoulder, so she was standing right by the driver’s seat. He wanted Rita to see, and she did.

‘Now turn the key, Ben,’ he said.

He did not point the key out to Ben, but Ben’s face turned to Rita, for instructions. Rita bent in, touched the key.

Ben fiddled with it, turned it, turned it off as the machine coughed, turned it on, so the car was alive, but grumbled and coughed and died. It was a rackety, cheap third-or fourth-hand car, belonging to a driver who was in between prison sentences for stealing cars.

‘Try again,’ said Rita. Her voice was actually shaking, because she was thinking, Oh, poor Ben, he’s like a three-year-old, and somewhere she had been foolishly believing that he could learn this job. Ben’s hairy fist enclosed the key, and shook it, the car came alive, and now Ben began a pantomime of shifting gears, for he knew that that was what you had to do. It was an automatic.

‘Now,’ said Johnston, leaning right in, and pointing to the lever. ‘I’m going to show you what to do with that.’ And he did, again and again. ‘You squeeze these little side pieces together – see? Then let the brake go – now do it. Then, be careful, watch to see if a car is coming.’ All this was silly; Ben could not see, could not do it. He was making his fist close up tight, watching Johnston’s hand, pulling his hand back and then putting it forward near the brake, but he wasn’t really doing it, because he couldn’t. As Johnston had known.

Rita was crying. Johnston straightened up from the window, and opened the door, and said to Ben, ‘Get out.’ Obedient, Ben got out, not wanting to; he wanted to go on sitting there playing at being a driver. Then Rita said to Johnston, ‘You’re cruel. I don’t like that.’

She went into her doorway, not looking at him or at Ben. Johnston pretended to find work in his cubbyhole, though no customers had turned up, and Ben followed Rita up the stairs.

It was better up there now Johnston’s powerful odours had gone, leaving only memories in the air.

Rita said to Ben, ‘You don’t have to go anywhere, if you don’t want to.’ She sounded sulky, offended, but that was because she was angry at having cried. She did not like showing weakness, and particularly not in front of Johnston.

‘Sit down, Ben,’ she said, and he sat on the chair while she painted her face to hide the marks of tears. Then she made up her eyes again, to look enormous, with the black and green paints. This was so customers would not notice her face, which was not pretty, but pale, or even white, because she was never really well.

‘Why does it say I am a film actor?’ asked Ben.

Rita simply shook her head, defeated, by the difficulty of explaining. She knew he did not go to the cinema, and was able to put herself in his place enough to know that reality was more than enough for him, he could not afford to complicate that by pretence. She did not know that it was the building itself which frightened him: the dark inside, the rows of seats where anybody might be, the tall lit screen, which hurt his eyes.

In fact she had been impressed by Johnston arranging with ‘his friend’ to have actor on the passport. Actors did not work all the time. They were often idle. She had actors among her customers: to be out of work was no crisis for them, though it might be a worry. Ben looked out of the ordinary, but you expected pop stars and actors to look amazing. No, it was a brilliant strategy. In a crowd of film people or the music scene, Ben would not be so conspicuous. But what was Johnston up to? She knew it could be nothing good.

And yet something had to be done about Ben. It was late summer now, but soon it would be autumn, and then winter. Ben had twice been moved on from his favourite bench by the police. What was he going to do in winter? The police knew him. All the homeless and down-and-out people must know him. Probably Johnston was right: Rita had not been to France, but she had been to Spain and Greece, and could imagine Ben more easily in a tapas bar, or a taverna, than a London pub. But Johnston wasn’t concerned for Ben’s well-being, she knew that.

That night, late, when her last customers had gone, and the minicab drivers had gone home, when it was more morning than night, and Ben was crouching in a doorway in Covent Garden, she asked Johnston what he intended for Ben, and when she heard she was angry and tried to hit Johnston, who held her wrists and said, ‘Shut up. It’s going to work, you’ll see.’

Johnston planned to make Ben carry cocaine – ‘A lot, Reet, millions’ – across to Nice, not concealed at all, but in ordinary holdalls, under a layer of clothes. ‘Don’t you see, Reet? Ben is so amazing the narks will be trying to figure him out, they won’t have time for anything else.’

‘And when he gets there?’

‘Why should you care? What’s he to you? He’s a bit of rough for you, that’s all.’

‘I’m sorry for him. I don’t want him to get hurt.’

This was where, in the previous exchange, the word ‘bars’ had arrived. ‘Bars’ were imminent again.

‘He couldn’t manage an aeroplane, he couldn’t manage luggage, what’s he going to do in a place where people don’t speak English?’

‘I’ve thought of everything, Reet.’ And he detailed his plan.

Rita had to admit that Johnston had thought of everything. She was impressed. But suppose the plan did succeed, at the end of it Ben would be alone in a foreign country.

‘I don’t want him hanging around here. People notice him. The police want an excuse to close me down. They don’t like the cabs being here. I keep telling them, you may not like us, but the public do. I could keep twice the number of cabs busy, if we had parking space. But they are just putting up with me and waiting for an excuse. And Ben is like a big notice saying, “Here is trouble”. And I’m scared of him starting another fight. One of the drivers said something and Ben knocked him down.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He called him a hairy ape. I stopped the fight. But – I want you to understand, Reet.’

Rita had to concede the justice of all that. But there was more: Johnston was jealous. ‘Funny thing,’ she said. ‘You’ve never been jealous of anybody. But you are of him.’

He didn’t like this, but at last grinned a little, not pleasantly, and said, ‘Well, I can’t compete, can I? Not with a great hairy ape?’

‘He’s a lot more than that.’

‘Listen, Reet, I don’t care. I’ve had enough of him.’

Johnston’s plan began with taking Ben to shops, good ones, and buying good clothes. No more stuff from charity shops. Buying jeans, trousers, underclothes – that was easy: but those shoulders, that chest, the heavy arms – in the end Johnston decided on a bespoke tailor, and got him shirts that fitted, and a couple of jackets.

‘And what is all that going to cost?’ asked Rita.

‘I told you, there’s millions in this.’

‘Dream on.’

‘You’ll see.’

Next, Ben was taken to a barber. He wished the old woman could see him now: she had said he would look good, and he knew he did. The barber had exclaimed over the double crown, but by the time he had finished who could notice?

Now Johnston took Ben up for a flight over London in a small plane, to get him used to flying. At first Ben’s eyes rolled in his head and he gave a roar of fear, as he looked down, but Johnston was sitting beside him, behaving as if nothing was wrong, and he said, ‘Look Ben, do you see that? It’s the river, you know the river. And look, there’s Covent Garden. And there’s Charing Cross Road.’ Ben took it all in and told Rita about it. ‘When can I do it again?’ he wanted to know.

‘You are going to do it again. In a big plane. Soon.’

And then, she thought, I’ll probably not see you again… She was fond of him, yes, she was. She was going to miss… She permitted, no, invited, quite a few of the extraordinary fucks that were like nothing she had experienced. She knew very well that it was not in his nature that these could lead to tenderness. There was no connection between those short violent acts of possession and what happened even seconds later, when it was as if nothing at all had happened. And yet, once when she had allowed him to stay the night, he had nuzzled up to her in his sleep, that hairy face pushing into her neck, and he had licked her face and her neck. She supposed he was fond of her. He asked if she was coming to France too, but what did he imagine when he said France?

‘It’s the same as here, Ben,’ she tried to explain. ‘There’s a nice blue sea, though. You know what sea is?’

Yes, he did; he remembered going with his family to the seaside.

‘Well, then, it’s like that. Like here only the sea is right close.’ She found some postcards of Nice, of that coast, and he puzzled over them: she knew he did not see what she saw. And she had not said that there would be a different language, different sounds.

Rita was leaning in her doorway, dressed for the part in black leather and black fishnet stockings, watching Johnston wave people to the minicabs, directing the drivers – the usual scene on this pavement from mid-afternoon till twelve or one in the morning, as people came from theatres and restaurants, when she saw a man she did not like the look of come up to Johnston, confront him. Johnston was afraid, she knew. In her experience trouble always started like this: a man appeared from nowhere with a certain look about him that said, ‘Look out!’ – and then something bad happened. When this man had taken himself off, she saw Johnston sweating, leaning on his cubbyhole counter, taking quick gulps from a bottle kept there. Then he saw her, took in her concern, and said, ‘We’ve got to talk, Reet.’

That night she made sure the door on the street that led up to her room was locked, and invited Johnston up. She lay on her bed, propped against pillows, one leg dangling – a pose she had evolved to excite customers – smoking, and watched Johnston shifting and fidgeting on his chair. He was smoking, and took frequent mouthfuls from his whisky flask. The stale smoky air was making her cough.

She knew his story – most of it. He had run away at fourteen from a bad home. He had done a spell in borstal, then lived rough, kept himself by shoplifting and thieving. A year in prison. That over, he went straight for a time, but a sentence for robbery with violence took him back. He had finished that five years ago. Wheeling and dealing, at first just ahead of the law, but then in deep, and deeper, involved in a dozen scams, which became increasingly dangerous, he was aided by the skills he had learned in prison and because he was known in the criminal community. The minicab business did well enough, but it had never been much more than a front. She was not surprised that he was in trouble, and when he said, ‘I’m in a trap, Reet,’ imagined a debt or two, perhaps blackmail. But now, as he began to tell her, strengthening himself with large gulps of whisky – he was a bit drunk – she sat up on the edge of the bed, and stared at him.

‘What are you saying? What are you telling me?’

He had been persuaded by a man on the fringes of respectability to try his luck on the stock exchange – futures. You couldn’t lose, this friend said. There was money, if you kept your head. Well, they had kept their heads but not their money.

‘You’re telling me you owe a million pounds?’

‘That’s nothing, Reet. A million’s nothing to that lot.’

‘Well, it’s a lot to you.’

‘True,’ he said, and drank.

‘So. You’re afraid of going back to prison?’

‘Right on. That’s what I’ll be doing, if I can’t get some real money.’

‘Let’s get this straight. You owe a million, or the two of you together?’

‘He owes much more. He was in deeper than me. He did me a bit of a favour really, he let me in – but now if I don’t give him a million he’s going to shop me and I’ll go down.’

She lay back again, and coughed. ‘Fucking pollution,’ she said. ‘Sometimes this room’s so full of stink from the street I can’t breathe.’ The cigarette smoke thus being neatly excused, she lit another, and threw Johnston one.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘But if you don’t get away with this cocaine deal, if they catch you, you’ll go down anyway. For life probably.’

‘That’s right, but I’m going to get away with it.’

‘So before you even start to get some money for yourself you’ve got to pay back a million?’

‘When the stuff arrives in Nice, that’s the million paid. And the rest is for me.’

‘Nothing for Ben?’

‘Oh, I’ll see him right.’

‘And how about me?’ she enquired. ‘Aren’t I taking any risks?’

‘You won’t know what’s in those cases, Reet. I’m going to make sure of that.’

‘When they nab Ben, and ask him where he got the stuff, he’ll say from me. Because he knows me better than he knows you, and he trusts me. So he’ll say it was me.’

A silence.

‘But he knows that he is taking something from me to a friend in France.’

A silence.

‘From me, Reet.’

‘But I’m in it too, aren’t I? Ben doesn’t know enough to lie well. We can’t count on him. He’ll say it was me and you.’

Johnston cut this knot with, ‘You just tell me something. How do you see yourself, Reet? You don’t fancy this life – so I’ve heard you say, haven’t I? Well, you stand by me in this and I’ll see that you get out of this life, for good.’

‘You’ll see me right, like Ben?’

Now Johnston leaned forward, waving away swathes of cigarette smoke, and spoke to her – she saw clearly enough – from the heart. ‘Look, you and I have gone along together – how long now, Reet? Three years? I haven’t let you down ever – well, have I?’

‘No, you haven’t.’

‘Well then?’

He continued to lean forward, all drunken appeal, desperate, his reddened eyes wet – from the smoke? From tears?

‘It’s such a gamble,’ she said. ‘You’re taking such a chance.’

‘I’ve got to, Reet. If I get away with this, then I’m clear for the rest of my life.’

She lay back again, this time with her two legs straight in front of her, and stared at him, and thought she didn’t know which of them she was more sorry for, Johnston, who she knew had it in him to be better than he was – she knew because this was true of her, too – and who had such a power to impress people, looking as he did like Humphrey Bogart – well, most of the time he did, a little at least, but not now when he was drunk and stupid – or Ben, who was being sent off into such danger, to save Johnston. But when she came to think of it, and she was thinking hard now, she owed more to Johnston than to Ben. She supposed she could say Johnston was her man: she didn’t have another, after all. And it was true, he had been good to her. And what he said was true, that she hated this life and had several times thought of doing herself in. ‘Better do myself in before some sex maniac does it for me.’ She knew she probably wouldn’t last long, anyway. She was unhealthy. Her skin was bad. Her hair when not dyed silver-blonde was a coarse limp black mess: you had only to touch it to know she was sick. When she was not made up, not dressed for the kill, she looked at herself in the glass – and put on her make-up as fast as she could.

Now she thought, Right! Suppose they do catch Ben and send me down, it couldn’t be much worse than this life. And she decided to help Johnston. In every way she could.

And now Johnston took Ben through what would happen at the airport. When he was finished, Rita repeated it all, again and again.

Everything was going to depend on Johnston’s ‘friend’ – ‘I knew him in prison, Reet, he’s all right’ – he would be with Ben at the airport and then on the plane and then go with him into Nice and look after him.

‘And how much are you paying him?’

‘A lot. When you put everything together, and add it all up – clothes for Ben, the luggage, the trip on the aeroplane, the passport

– that was a hundred for a start – and Richard – that’s the contact

– then it all adds up. And there’s the hotel, too. But even so it’s peanuts compared with what there’s in it for us.’

‘Well, don’t spend it before you have it, that’s all.’

‘Look, Reet, I know you think I’m barmy, but it’ll work, you’ll see.’

‘Luck, that’s all,’ said Rita. ‘They have sniffer dogs, they check the luggage.’

‘Sometimes they do. But they aren’t going to bother with a load of tourists going to Nice. And that goes for the French narks too. They’ll be watching planes from Colombia and the East, not a nice little harmless plane from London.’

There was one thing Rita didn’t know. The plan was for three cases: one very big, stuffed with packets of cocaine, with a layer of clothing over it, which would be checked in at the desk; one with Ben’s things in it; and one to take on the plane. When Rita heard that Johnston planned to fill this one too with the deadly packets, possibly heroin, she screamed, she shouted, she even assaulted him, so he had to hold her fists. ‘You know they pick cases to check, just at random, they could easily pick Ben’s take-on case.’ He soothed her and promised her, said he wouldn’t do it, if she was upset about it, but in fact he did not keep this promise: Ben was to go through to the plane and on to it carrying the dangerous case.

‘The whole thing is mad,’ Rita kept saying. ‘And poor Ben – it’s cruel, I think. Just imagine him in prison.’

‘It’s just because he’s so weird that it’s going to work.’

It did work. There was a period while Johnston and Rita could not believe how much things were changing; the difference between their circumstances now, and what was possible to them was too great. Johnston was not so stupid to allow large sums of money to appear in a bank account, but large sums found their way deviously to him over the next few months. He gave Rita enough to buy a restaurant in Brighton, which did well. She could have married, but did not. Sometimes Johnston came to see her, meetings precious to them both, since only they understood how narrowly they had escaped lives of prison and crime.

Johnston had seen on a television programme that it was easy to buy a title and right to land from impoverished (and surely cynical?) aristocrats, for sums that now seemed to him negligible. He did this, became a lord of a manor, but was soon restless and knew he had made a mistake. He did not like doing nothing. He became owner of a very superior car-hire firm, chauffeuring the rich and the famous, mostly around London, and employed the kind of person whom once he would have thought of as far above him. He enjoyed his life, loved his Rolls-Royces and Mercedes, and cultivated respectability. His children, when he got them, went to good private schools. So you could say that this part of our tale had a happy ending.

On the morning of the great gamble Ben was dressed by Rita – Johnston supervising – in a bespoke shirt and a good jacket. Rita was crying, when Johnston put Ben into one of the minicabs, and instructed the driver exactly what to do. The last thing Ben said was, ‘When am I coming home?’ ‘We’ll see,’ said Johnston, and Rita turned away so Ben would not see her guilty face.

He allowed himself to be driven to Heathrow, though he was feeling sick. The driver parked in Short-term Parking, and got a trolley for the bags, a black one, a red one, a blue one. He took Ben to the club-class check-in desk, handed in Ben’s passport, took it back with the boarding pass, and nudged Ben when he was asked if he had forbidden items, and if he had packed the bags himself. Rita had told him over and over again that he must say that yes, he had packed them himself. He remembered, after a hesitation. The check-in girl had taken in ‘Film Actor’ on the passport, and was staring at Ben during her ministrations to his cases and the boarding card. This stare did not discompose Ben, he was so used to it. The driver, a Nigerian, who was being paid a good bit extra, walked with Ben to Fast Track, gave him his carry-on case, the blue one, his passport and the boarding card, and told him, ‘Go through there.’ When Ben hesitated he gave Ben a little push, and stood back to watch him go, so he could report back.

Ben was by himself, and he was terrified, his mind whirling with everything he had to remember. He showed his boarding card to the official, who glanced at it, and stared at him, and went on staring until the next traveller claimed his attention. Now there was a difficult bit. Over and over again Rita and Johnston had told him what to do. Ahead would be a kind of black box, with an opening that had things hanging down. He must go to it and put his case on the shelf there. The case would disappear into the opening, and he must look for the metal arch, close to, go through it when told, and then a man would search him, feel his pockets and down his thighs. Ben had said, ‘What for?’ And they had said, ‘Just to make sure you’re all right.’ The word ‘guns’ would have scared him. This was the part Rita feared most, because she knew how unpredictably Ben reacted to being touched.

Ben saw the machine ahead. It seemed to him frightful, and he wanted to run away. He knew he must go on. There was no one waiting to help him. He stood with his case in his hand, helpless, until a man behind him said, ‘Put it there – look.’ And when Ben did not move he took the case and put it into the machine. This unknown helper went ahead of him to the arch, since Ben hesitated, and so Ben saw what he had to do.

Meanwhile his holdall was moving through the x-ray machine. Under the top layer of clothing, among paper packets of the terrible white powder, were inserted here and there toilet things, scissors, a nail-file, clippers, a razor – all in metal which would show up on the screen. But this was the key moment, when ill-luck might lay its hands on Ben and – unless Ben remembered, when interrogated, never to say Rita’s name or Johnston’s – on them too.

If the girl at the x-ray machine was doing her job, absorbed in it, the official whose job it was to frisk Ben hardly touched him. He was staring at the shoulders, the great chest, thinking, Good God! What is this? Ben was grinning. It was from terror, but what this official saw was the smile of a celebrity used to being recognised – he saw plenty of celebrities. If he had laid his hands closely on Ben he would have found him trembling, sweating, cold – but he waved Ben on. Now Ben had to remember to retrieve his case from the machine’s exit. He did not know that here was his moment of greatest danger: descriptions of what he had to do were not put to him in terms of danger. But luck held: ‘Is this your case, sir?’ was not said to Ben, but to the man coming after him. Ben stood there grinning, and then, understanding at last that this blue case jiggling there beside him was his, remembered instructions, took it up and went on towards… He was in a daze, and a dazzle, feeling sick and cold. This great space with its lights, its crowds, the shops, the colours, so much movement and noise – in any case it would have frightened him, but he knew that he must remember, must remember… He was on the edge of sending out little whimpers of helplessness, but then he saw that just ahead a man behind a desk was waving him on and he must show his passport. It was in his hand. How had it got there? He couldn’t remember… But the official merely glanced at it and back at Ben. What he was thinking was, If he is a film star then I’ve never seen him in anything.

Now Ben was standing well beyond the line of passport desks and he did not know what to do next. He had been told there would be someone there looking out for him, Johnston’s friend, and yes, there he was, a young man was hurrying forward, scared eyes on Ben’s face.

It was at this point that something happened that had not been foreseen. Johnston – had he been watching – would have said, ‘That’s it! I’ve done it!’ Barring some really unfair bad luck he would shortly be the owner of several million pounds sterling.

The young man, Ben’s minder, was – literally – shaking with relief, and from the reaction. He arrived directly in front of Ben, trying to smile, saying hurriedly, ‘I’m Johnston’s friend, I’m Richard.’

Ben said, ‘I’m cold. I want my jersey.’ He put down the holdall, and tried to unzip it, not seeing at first the tiny lock. He said, ‘Where is the key? Why is it locked up?’

Richard Gaston (but he had many names in his life) had arrived in London yesterday on the ferry from Calais, and had spent hours with Johnston being given instructions for this day’s events, and for afterwards, in Nice. He travelled out to Heathrow on the Underground, stood at a distance watching the scene with the minicab driver and Ben at check-in, had gone separately through passport control and customs, with the economy travellers, had waited for Ben to emerge, all the time enlarging his ideas of himself with reflected glory from Johnston, who was so clever. He had had many doubts about this scene, just like Rita, but look, it had succeeded.

And here was Ben, bending down, tugging at the zip, pulling at the lock. It was evident that those hands could tear the holdall apart, if Ben decided to do it that way. Richard imagined those packets scattered everywhere, the security people coming up…

‘I’m cold,’ said Ben.

It was a warm afternoon and Ben already had a jerkin on over his shirt – a very posh shirt, as Richard noted.

‘You can’t be cold,’ was Richard’s injudicious order to Ben. ‘Now, come on. We’ve cut it a bit fine. They’re boarding. Don’t be difficult, now.’

These words had an effect which caused Richard to jump back and away from Ben, who was apparently about to grip him by the arms and then… Ben was seething with rage.

‘I want my jersey!’ shouted Ben. ‘I’ve got to have my jersey!’

Richard was scared, but not numbed by it. He was rallying himself. He had been told that Ben was a bit funny… he had moods… he had to be humoured… he was a bit simple. ‘But he’s all there, so don’t treat him like a dummy.’

These descriptions of Ben, scattered through the hours of discussion with Johnston, seemed to Richard all off the point. Johnston would call this ‘a mood’, would he? Richard was sending nervous glances all around. Was anyone watching? Well, they soon would, if Ben went on shouting.

If that zip broke, if that little lock sprang open…

Richard said, gasping, ‘Listen, Ben, listen, mate. We’re going to miss the plane. You’ll be OK in the plane. They’ll give you a blanket.’

Ben stood up, letting the holdall fall. Richard couldn’t know it, but it was the word ‘blanket’ that reached him. The old woman had used to say, ‘Take this blanket, Ben, wrap yourself up a bit. The heating’s a bit low tonight.’

Richard saw that things had changed: Ben was no longer breathing pure murder. Now, unwittingly, he added to his advantage, ‘Johnston wouldn’t want you to spoil it now. You’ve done good, Ben. You’re right on. You’re a bit of a wonder, Ben.’

It was the word good.

Ben picked up the holdall, went with Richard along the corridors, the moving pavements, to the right places. It had all been nicely judged: they would be in the middle of the crowd of people boarding. At the desk Ben found his passport and boarding card in his hand, put there by this new friend, who had taken them from him, it seemed, while they argued – Ben had let them fall as he wrestled with the zip and the lock – and then on they walked, along and down and around and down, and then there was a door and by it a smiling female, who directed the two to club class. Ben stood helpless in the aisle, and Richard took the case from him and slid it up into the bin, feeling as if he were handling a snake. He had told Johnston that on no account would he touch that case, so that he could tell any interrogator that he knew nothing about it, but now he saw how foolish that had been. Ben was in his seat, the seatbelt was fastened across him, and Richard was about to ask for a blanket, and then explain to Ben about the take-off, the flight – there would be clouds underneath them and then… But Ben had fallen asleep.

What a good thing, thought Richard. What a relief.

Ben slept until they landed and people were getting off. Ben was dazed and it seemed he hardly knew who Richard was. He forgot the precious case when the time came to stand up and pull it down. Richard hauled it down for him, and carried it all the way to the luggage carousel. Almost at once the great black bag appeared – the dangerous one – and then the red one, with Ben’s things in it.

‘When are we going on the plane?’ asked Ben. He had expected something like the trip he had made with Johnston over London in the little plane.

Richard did not answer: ahead was the last hazard, Customs, but they were not bothering. In a moment the two were out in the sunshine, and then, with the bags, in a taxi. Richard was sitting back in his seat, eyes closed, still shaking with the terror of it all. He knew very well that it was only luck that had saved them even while he thought admiringly of Johnston. He wanted badly to sleep: he understood why Ben had gone to sleep, from strain, on the plane. During that ride, Ben was silent. For one thing, his eyes hurt, because of the glitter of the sun on the sea – he did not at first understand that great scoop of shining blue, which was nothing like the seaside at home. He felt sick, too: he hated cars, he always had. Then they were on a pavement, with people everywhere, and Richard led Ben to a table where he sat, pushing a chair towards him. Ben sat, as if this might be a trap, and the chair could close around him like jaws. It was mid-afternoon. They were under a little umbrella but the tiny patch of shade did not do much for Ben’s painful eyes. He sat with them half-closed. The waiter came: coffee for Richard, but Ben wanted orange juice, he hated coffee. Cakes came, but Ben never did like cake much, so Richard ate them. And there they sat, hardly talking, Ben trying to take in what he could of the glitter and clamour of the scene around him through half-closed eyes. It was a busy street, and a busy cafe, and no one was taking any notice of them. Then, suddenly, a man appeared by the table, and Richard said to him, ‘The black one and the blue one.’ Ben watched as this person, an apparition composed of bright light and noise, disappeared towards a taxi with the two cases. Only Ben and Richard watched. No one else, whether idling on the pavement, or sitting at the cafe tables, or driving past, so much as glanced at the two cases, one very large, one of an ordinary size, whose contents would soon be added to the rivers of poison that circulate everywhere in the world. Ben was confused. He had thought the blue one, that he had carried through the machines and the officials, was his, but it seemed not. This red one was his. And there was something else that he was at last just beginning to take in – he had been too confused to understand. All around him people were talking loudly, but he did not understand what they said. Rita had told him that everyone would talk French, but it was all right, Johnston’s friend was British and would talk English and look after him – but he had not known that he was going to sit at a table in this foreign country understanding nothing, but nothing, of what was going on around him. And that man, the one who had gone off with the bags, had understood Richard talking English, but to the taxi driver he had spoken in French. Exhaustion was numbing Ben again.

‘And so that’s that,’ said Richard, and he had to say it, to mark or define the accomplishment of the deed, but he knew Ben had no idea of what had happened.

‘I’m going to take you to the hotel,’ he said to Ben.

A lot of discussion had gone into the choice of hotel. Rita had said, a cheap one, where people are friendly – meaning herself. Johnston had said, ‘No, a good hotel. They’ll speak English. In a cheap hotel they’ll only speak French.’

‘He won’t know how to cope with a good hotel,’ said Rita, but she was wrong. It all went brilliantly. Ben had only to sign his name at the hotel desk, while people smiled at him, because he was a film star, and then followed by smiles he was led to a lift by Richard. He hesitated there because of his fear of lifts, but Richard pushed him into it, and it was only two floors, no more than a moment. In his room he was at once at ease, because it reminded him of his childhood, his home. So much was this so that he looked at the window to see if there were bars. Then he went to them, to look out: much lower down than the windows of Mrs Biggs’ flat in Mimosa House, Halley Street. He strolled about the room, the grin gone from his face, and Richard, slumped into a chair, watching, knew that everything was going to be easy. All he had to do was show Ben the bathroom and how the shower worked, and the air conditioning. Then he said that he must go, but he would be back soon to take Ben to supper.

He left Ben sitting in a chair looking up through open windows at a blue, hot sky.

He telephoned Johnston, but only said, ‘It’s OK – yes, it’s all right.’

Johnston heard this, and at once ran up Rita’s stairs to tell her, and went off into fantasies of doing it all again: he would fetch Ben back, and repeat the triumph. But Rita brought him down to earth. ‘Stop it, Johnston. You’ve got away with it this time.’

When Richard returned, Ben was splashing and shouting in the shower, apparently quite happy, but the first thing he said, as he came out to dry himself and get dressed, was, ‘When can I go back home?’

Richard took him to a proper restaurant, mostly because he wanted to eat well for once: he was having a thin time of it. But he might just as well have gone to a McDonald’s. Ben would only drink juice, and, saying he was hungry, ate a big steak, leaving the frites and the salad, and then wanted another. Afterwards Richard took him strolling along the front, to look at the sea, then another cafe, then to an evening show with dancing and singing. Richard could not make out what Ben thought of it all: he agreed to everything but only when he was eating seemed to show real enjoyment.

At the hotel Richard counted some money into Ben’s hand, and said, ‘You won’t need it, but in case. And I’ll be here early tomorrow.’ His orders were to see that Ben could manage ordinary day-to-day things. Then he took a big packet of money down to the hotel safe, and checked it, in Ben’s name, for he knew, from watching Ben’s unobservant ways, that if he carried that money, thieves would have had it all off him in a day.