Читать книгу Cry Myself to Sleep: He had to escape. They would never hurt him again. - Joe Peters - Страница 9

As he drove me to the station, he told me his name was Mohamed and gave me a piece of mint-flavoured gum as he chatted. He seemed a nice man and I began to relax my guard a little as I chewed. I didn’t like driving back into the city that I was trying to escape from, but I could see that he was right: I might never get away on the road. If he was genuinely willing to get me a train ticket, that was an offer I wasn’t in a position to refuse. Arriving at the station, he parked in the taxi rank and we went in to the ticket office together, both of us unsure of how to behave with one another. The large, unsmiling woman behind the glass stared at us with a sort of unbothered hostility over the top of her half-moon glasses, like a headmistress trying to work out why a misbehaving pupil has been brought to see her.

‘A single ticket for my friend to get the next train to London, please,’ Mohamed said politely.

‘They’re doing repairs to the track,’ she told him. ‘Services have been suspended and he’s missed the last connection to London for this evening.’

‘When is the next connection, please?’ Mohamed asked.

‘Six o’clock tomorrow morning,’ she said, looking past him and returning my angry, gum-chewing scowl with the calm stare of someone enjoying their little moment of power.

I could see that she was wondering what such a young-looking boy was doing travelling on his own and having his ticket bought for him by a middle-aged Asian man. It obviously struck her as strange. My heart was thumping and I was poised to run if she went to press an alarm button or pick up a phone to call the police. I felt so close to escaping, and the thought of having to hang around the cold station all night made me shiver. The disdain that she was showing towards Mohamed was stoking my anger back up again.

‘Can I buy a ticket for tomorrow then?’ Mohamed persevered.

‘Are you travelling alone?’ she asked me, ignoring him completely. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Course I’m all right,’ I snarled back angrily. ‘Look, woman, are you going to give us this ticket or not?’

All the boys in the homes I had been in talked like that to virtually everyone. We all wanted to sound like the black guys we met on the streets. We wanted to mimic their easy confidence and cheek in the face of authority. I expect we all sounded as foolish as Ali G suggested when he turned our patter into a comic character. I guess the ticket lady lost interest in my welfare at that moment, deciding I was a nasty piece of work and could look after myself for all she cared, because she passed the ticket over and took Mohamed’s money.

‘Enjoy your trip,’ she said to me.

I glanced back as we walked away and saw that she was watching us go, obviously still curious about what our story might be, perhaps not certain that she had done the right thing by issuing the ticket. Maybe she had grandsons my age.

My next worry was how to get through a night on the station without being picked up by the police. I was still worried that Mum’s neighbours might have reported the damage I’d done to the house, and once the police started checking me out they would pretty soon put two and two together. Thanks to Mohamed I now had my ticket to the promised land of Charing Cross; I just needed to stay out of sight for the next ten or so hours. I had a feeling that Mohamed had been as offended by the woman’s suspicions as I had, but he didn’t say anything as we walked back out to his taxi, both of us wondering what to do next. It was as if I had become his responsibility now.

‘What are you going to do tonight, Joe?’ he asked eventually.

‘Find somewhere to wait, I suppose,’ I said with a shrug, trying to look as if I wasn’t bothered.

I guess he was worried about what would happen to me if he left me on the street, but equally he was nervous about giving the wrong impression by asking me if I wanted to go back to his place. We were both stuck in a strange, polite sort of limbo.

‘Don’t misunderstand me, please, Joe,’ he said eventually, ‘but why don’t you come back to my flat for something to eat while you think about what to do next?’

All my instincts flared up and warned me to be wary. I knew from bitter and painful experience how foolish it could be to go to a strange place with a man I knew nothing about. But at the same time the option of being picked up by the police seemed worse. He appeared to be a genuinely kind man and he wasn’t being pushy or creepy in any way. I decided it was a chance worth taking.

‘OK,’ I said, shrugging, as if it was I who was agreeing to do him a favour, rather than the other way round.

We climbed back into the car and as we drove I picked up a book that was lying next to the seat.

‘What’s this?’ I asked, wanting to make conversation and break the awkwardness of the moment.

‘It is the Qu’ran,’ he said. ‘The Holy Book. I am a Muslim.’

‘That’s where you’re from?’ I asked, having no idea what he was talking about.

‘No,’ he said, smiling. ‘It is my religion. I am a Muslim Brother.’

My ignorance was so total that I stayed silent, unable to think what to say next without sounding stupid. He must have realized that I knew nothing and spent the rest of the trip trying to explain it to me. By the time we got to his flat I was lost in new thoughts as I tried to make sense of what he was telling me about his God and his beliefs. I liked the fact that he talked to me as if we were just friends, not like an adult with a difficult kid, which was the tone I was used to hearing in other people’s voices.

‘My wife and I are getting a divorce,’ he explained as he opened the door to his flat. ‘So I have only just moved into this place. Our marriage was arranged for us by our families and we were not suited. My family are all very angry with me for leaving.’

It was a cold, empty-feeling place with a musty, damp smell oozing from the shabby walls and worn carpet. There was hardly any furniture apart from a strangely old-fashioned record player housed in a wooden cabinet. There was no television or radio to break the silence of the little rooms. He explained that everything he owned he had left in the family house with his wife. The only decorations in sight were the pictures of the small children he had left behind in exchange for this bleak place. He saw me looking at the photographs and began to tell me about them, his face glowing with pride.

‘You want to listen to some music?’ he asked, gesturing towards the record player.

‘OK.’

He pulled out an Elvis record and started dancing wildly round the flat, encouraged by my laughter to ever greater heights as he mimed to the words, eager to entertain me. I recognized the songs because my dad had been a big Elvis fan and used to play the songs in the car on the days when he drove me around to keep me out of Mum’s way. The music was embedded in my head as firmly as the images of Dad burning to death in front of my eyes. It unlocked happy memories of our short time together but also reminded me of the cold horror of his love being snatched so cruelly away from me so young, the only love I had ever known.

When the song ‘My Boy’ came on, the surge of emotion took me by surprise. Images of my father and me together in the car, of sitting with him in the garage while he worked and of watching him running around in flames in front of me became overwhelming, and my laughter at Mohamed’s wild antics turned to a choking sensation in my throat as I struggled not to cry. Dad used to play that song to me all the time, over and over again, telling me I was his boy. It was ‘our song’.

The harder I fought to hold back the tears the more overwhelmed I felt by the emotions that the song unleashed in me. Mohamed stopped in the middle of his dancing, shocked to see that my tears of laughter had turned so suddenly to misery.

‘What is the matter, Joe?’ he wanted to know. ‘Have you hurt yourself?’

‘It’s the song,’ I said, not trusting myself to be able to explain any more than that.

‘I’ll turn it off. I’ll turn it off.’

‘No,’ I said, not wanting to reject the memories of Dad and be left back in the awkward silence. ‘I want to listen to it.’

‘Not good song?’ Mohamed asked, obviously worried that he had upset me.

‘It’s memories. My dad’s song.’

As I listened to the rest of the track and cried, Mohamed stood beside me and put his hand on my shoulder until it was over.

‘You want to listen to it again?’

‘Yeah,’ I nodded, no longer trying to hide the tears, wiping my running nose on my sleeve.

‘I will go and make us some food while you listen,’ he said, putting the track back on and disappearing out to the kitchen to leave me alone with my memories.

‘No more Elvis,’ Mohamed announced when he came back into the room a few minutes later. ‘I am making us a nice curry.’

As the smell of cooking drifted into the room and my saliva glands started to work, I realized that I was really hungry. I had never tasted curry before, but I was ready for anything by the time he had managed to find a second chair to go beside the little garden-style table he had set up for us to eat from, and I dived straight in the moment he put the food in front of me, shovelling it into my mouth. The next moment I realized there was sweat breaking through every pore of my skin and my eyes were streaming with tears again, but for a different reason. It felt as if my mouth was on fire and I gulped water from the glass he had given me.

‘Hot, hot, hot!’ I gasped. ‘More water.’

Mohamed giggled as he went out to get a jug. ‘It is only a mild curry,’ he said, laughing.

‘You call that mild? It’s taken the roof of my mouth off.’

He had given me a spoon to eat with, but he was tucking in himself with his hands, which shocked me. I had spent so many years forced to scrabble for scraps of food off the floor as a child at home that I couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to eat like that and get their fingers so stained and sticky if they didn’t have to. I certainly didn’t intend to follow his example. If it could burn my mouth the way it had, I didn’t want to risk burning my fingers too.

We were both easy in each other’s company by then. He talked about his family and where he had come from and how he had arrived in England with his father. He tried to prompt me to talk about my life, but I didn’t want to even think about it, let alone talk about it, and he didn’t push me. I had also told him the lie about my family waiting for me in Charing Cross and I didn’t want to give him any reason to think that he should try to stop me from running away from home. Now that he was becoming my friend I felt bad that I had told him lies. I had always been falsely accused of being a liar when I was a child and I hated the idea that now I was actually turning into one.

‘The record “My Boy”–is that your dad’s record?’ he asked once we had finished eating.

‘Yeah,’ I said, and I could see that he was looking at me, waiting for me to go on. Reluctantly I told him about how Dad had died in the explosion in the garage he worked in, while I was sitting in the car watching, just five years old, but I didn’t tell him anything about what had happened after that, once Mum got her hands on me and started to wreak her campaign of revenge, hiding me away from the outside world for years. I could see that he was shocked enough by what I had told him: there was no need to go any further. He stopped asking questions, not wanting to upset me any more. I could see that his eyes were beginning to glaze over with tiredness and I was certainly exhausted myself, but I wanted to put off the moment of going back on to the street for as long as possible.

‘I can drop you back to the station now if you want,’ he said eventually, ‘or if you like I have a spare sleeping bag and you can sleep here for a few hours. I have no bed to offer you, I’m afraid.’

I could see that he was being very careful not to make it sound as if he was trying to take advantage, and I had also realized by then that there wasn’t a bed anywhere in the flat. He hadn’t given me any reason to distrust him and had shown me nothing but kindness.

‘OK,’ I said, as casually as I could manage. ‘I wouldn’t mind getting a few hours’ sleep.’

‘Good.’ He seemed pleased that we had made a decision and bustled around clearing away the plates and folding up the table so that there was room for two sleeping bags on the floor. Almost the moment he put the light out I heard him start to snore.

Lying on a hard floor was not comfortable. Even at the worst of times, when I was locked in the cellar at home for days on end, I had still had an old mattress under me. But as I wriggled around trying to find a position I could sleep in, I was aware that I was going to have to get used to it, because once I got to London it was likely I was going to be sleeping rough for a while before I made my fortune or met the love of my life and managed to get a roof over my head.

Eventually I must have drifted off, because the next thing I knew it was half past four and Mohamed was nudging me up from a deep sleep, out of which I was very reluctant to pull myself.

‘You must get train,’ he said when I finally came to the surface enough to remember where I was and to make sense of what he was saying. At that moment all I wanted to do was slide back to the blissful oblivion of sleep, but Mohamed was being insistent. ‘I make you a drink.’

He came back from the kitchen with a glass of orange squash.

‘I will be back in a minute,’ he said, disappearing out of the room again.

I drank the orange and got up to go to the bathroom. The door to the other room was ajar and I could see him down on his knees with his forehead touching the floor. I had never seen a Muslim at prayer before and had no idea what he was doing. It seemed to me that the whole world was populated by nutters, but at least Mohamed was harmless.

A few minutes later he came out and made me something to eat, and we set out for the station in the taxi. We arrived a few minutes early, so he came in to wait on the concourse with me. There were already crowds of passengers bustling around us, hurrying to get to their destinations. I felt a sense of apprehension building again, and was constantly shooting furtive glances around the station in case a policeman headed in our direction, or anyone who might recognize me.

‘If you are ever in trouble, Joe,’ Mohamed was saying earnestly, ‘you must ring me.’

‘OK.’

He wrote his name, address and telephone number down and passed it to me. I’m sure he must have guessed that I hadn’t told him everything about my past or my plans for the future, and that there was something not quite right about the way that I was spiriting myself away from my home town. I assume most people knew that Charing Cross was a magnet to homeless kids in search of better lives than the ones fate had dealt them, but he was sensitive enough not to question my lies or try to stop me. Offering to be there for me should I need a friend was the best thing he could possibly have done for me, but I tried to make out it was no big deal. As I folded the piece of paper into my pocket, he gave me a wad of money.

‘No, no,’ I said, feeling that he had done enough for me, not wanting to be any more in debt to him than I already was.

‘You repay me when you can,’ he said, pushing it into my only partially reluctant hand. ‘Send it in the post.’

Although I vowed to myself that I would do exactly that at the first opportunity, I expect he already knew that he would never see that money again. Once I got on the train I discreetly counted it and found he had given me £60, which was very generous for a man who was living in a bare flat and working every hour to try to support his ex-wife and children.

‘You look after yourself,’ he said, shaking my hand firmly. ‘Be good and be strong.’

It seemed to me that he was a little tearful about saying goodbye. I wonder if perhaps he was as much in need of a friend at that moment as I was.

As I turned and trotted off to find the London train, I felt a renewed surge of excitement. I was nearly there, nearly free of the city where I had been imprisoned ever since the day my father died, and I was about to have a whole bunch of new experiences.

‘Is this the train for London Paddington?’ I kept asking anyone who would listen, no matter how many of them assured me it was. I had never been on a train before and I didn’t want to risk getting on the wrong one, being whisked away to some other strange city and having to buy another ticket. I was mesmerized by the buzz of the station as the trains came and went and everyone else hurried around looking as if they knew exactly what they were doing and where they were going. I had no idea how far it was going to be from Paddington to Charing Cross; I just felt certain that once I was in London I would safe, able to melt into the anonymous crowd and leave the long agony of my childhood behind once and for all.

The London-bound train was surprisingly full. Maybe other people had had problems the previous evening like me but there were still quite a few seats in the carriage I chose. I settled down, looking all around me in awe, still nervously asking everyone if it was the right train. I was impressed by the space and comfort of the carriage, until the conductor came along and chucked me out, pointing out the signs on the window and the fact that I didn’t have a first-class ticket. I answered back aggressively, as I always did when I felt threatened, but he was obviously more than experienced at dealing with my sort.

‘Don’t give me any more of your lip, lad,’ he warned, and I stalked off with as much dignity as I could still muster.

The moment I passed out of first class I realized what a difference there was. There was none of the space and tranquillity in second class and by that time the carriages were crowded, and I only just managed to find myself a corner. It was only once I was wedged into the seat that I realized why it was still vacant. The man next to me smelled really badly of urine, like an old tramp. I pulled faces and made lots of comments to make sure no one thought it was I who smelled. Fortunately he got off a few stops later and I caught the eyes of the people opposite, pleased to see them laughing as I fanned ostentatiously under my nose.

The train was hurtling through the countryside, carrying me off to unknown adventures, and my spirits were soaring. I could hardly contain my excitement. Like a small boy at Christmas I was bouncing around, asking questions of anyone I could make eye contact with, making inane comments that I’m sure weren’t anything like as funny as I thought they were. I was trying to make people have conversations with me when all they wanted to do was read their books or their papers, or catch up on some sleep after their early starts. I just couldn’t stop myself from rabbiting on and on, but no one wanted to hear from a scruffy little oik like me.

It was a while before I realized that everyone who came to sit near me during the trip eventually moved off to find another seat, but even once the penny dropped it didn’t dampen my high spirits. I felt so free and so excited by the adventures that I was sure now lay ahead of me.