The Disappearance Boy (2 page)

Whether he was a man of twenty-two or a boy of sixteen. Or even fourteen, at that height.

Not that I want you to feel sorry for him, not for a minute. He doesn’t feel sorry for himself, and never has done, not since he was eight or nine – not since that morning with the train, in fact. He hates pity likes a dog hates cats, does our Reggie; hates it, in all its forms and sizes.

That’s why, when he reaches the junction of the Broadway with Russell Road – where the shoe shop is – young Reggie comes to a sudden and clumsy halt. Standing on a plinth just outside the entrance to the shop is a dummy made of painted and varnished papier mâché, and although Reggie has made the best job he can of ignoring the sight of this unpleasant object for several mornings in a row recently, on this particular morning he suddenly finds himself unable to keep up the effort any longer. The dummy depicts a four-foot-high little boy. His hair is an unlikely yellow, his lips a cheery cherry red, and the whites of his turned-up eyes look like they’ve been slicked on straight from the tin. Dressed in just a pair of shorts and a neat blue jumper, he’s wearing a leg-brace – complete with carefully painted-on brown leather straps – and has a crutch jammed into his left armpit. With his right hand – and this is the point of his whole existence – he is holding out a bright red loaf-sized collecting box whose slot is just the right size for a copper – or even, more optimistically, for a fat half-crown. If you’re a passer-by then this little boy’s blind stare is meant to make you smile sadly and fish in your bag for some change, but that’s not the effect it has on Reggie. In fact, if he thought he could get away with it, Reggie would have picked up a brick from a bomb site one morning this week and cheerfully smashed the face off the thing. Yesterday, he’d caught a shopper in the act of dropping her coin and then patting the boy’s head with her gloved hand as if it belonged to a dog or well-behaved pony, murmuring a few well-chosen words of approval. This morning, there is no lady – thank God, otherwise I think there might have been some kind of a scene – but there are some raindrops caught in the boy’s painted hair, and that, together with the memory of that murmuring, pale-gloved woman and her dropped coin – of the hollow noise it made – is what has stopped Reggie, late as he is. He knows exactly how it feels to be shivering in shorts and a piece of clumsily strapped-on aluminium on a cold March morning. He knows what it feels like to have wet hair, and to be small. He knows exactly how it feels to be looked down on.

He stares.

For a moment, his mouth works as if he wanted to spit, giving us a glimpse of some stained and pointed teeth – but then, without looking round to see if anyone is watching, Reggie takes a lurching step towards the sightless little effigy and reaches out and strokes the figure’s hair himself, carefully chasing each and every one of the raindrops out from the grooves between the painted curls. When they’ve all gone, he steps back, and says out loud,
There, that’s better
.

He stands a moment longer, staring at the boy some more, and at his crutch, and then, apparently remembering where he is – not to mention what time it is – he twists out a thin-lipped little grin – a grin with which you’re going to become very familiar, I hope – and mutters
Sod it
, to himself this time, but loud enough to make a passing housewife grimace and tut as she tries to get past him and into the shoe shop. Ignoring her stare, Reggie wraps his parcel back up again with a quick one-two rearrangement of his jacket; a darting look at the black-and-white enamelled clock on the front of the Co-op opposite confirms that it’s now gone twelve, so he lurches back off down the Broadway to deliver it at double time, pounding the pavement with that built-up boot of his as if he was angry with them both.

When he’s up to speed, this young man can thread himself through a thickening lunchtime crowd as surely as a darning needle can pierce silk, and I have to say it’s quite an act. Every human step is a fall from which we save ourselves, they say, but in Reggie’s case that’s even more true than normal; head down, he stabs the toe of that built-up left boot of his down into the paving stones in a kind of regular, staccato
demi-pointe
, making it the pivot over which he then levers the rest of his top-heavy self, catching himself just in time. Only once does his technique falter, and that’s when a puddle makes him misjudge his launch off the kerb at the corner of Southey Street – the kerbstone here is part of a botched-up repair to some bomb damage, and it tilts. He stumbles, and the two-sizes-too-big tweed jacket flaps open in the cold wind, revealing another underwing flash of white shirt. With the swiftness of habit he grabs it and rewraps himself, and the threat of an undignified tumble soon passes. Once he’s steadied himself, he taps himself on the chest, twice, right where the inside breast pocket of his jacket is, and then lurches on.

That breast pocket is where Reggie keeps his ration book – he’s always on the lookout for anything sweet, is our Reg, and confectionery is still on points in the spring of 1953. It’s also where, during the day, he keeps his knife. It’s not a big or dangerous blade, being merely a two-inch penknife with a delicate mother-of-pearl handle – a lady’s knife, really – but nonetheless, he never leaves his digs without it. He taps at his pocket like that quite often, without even realising he’s doing it, just to make sure the knife’s still there – either that, or for luck, I suppose.

Reggie’s destination? A black-painted door with a black-and-white sign over it, hidden down an alley just off Montague Road, which is only two more corners away. His employer? One Mr Edward Brookes Esquire, known in the profession as Ted or Teddy. His job?

Well, more of that later. It’s all about timing, this business.

Timing, and –

2

Under the harsh glare of a single pair of floodlights, a dark-haired man in his late thirties is stepping out onto the stage of an empty theatre. The auditorium is silent, but the man strides on exactly as if he was cutting his entrance through an anticipatory swathe of applause.
His
jacket is an impeccably cut and close-fitting double-breasted wool-mixture dinner jacket, satin-lapelled. He is wearing white gloves with a single pearl button, and showing a full inch of starched cuff. His hair is carefully side-parted. His feet are accented in black patent, his trousers have a black ribbon side-stripe, and he’s carrying a black top hat in his gloved right hand; in delicate contrast, the lighting is turning the thin coating of dust on the unswept boards of the stage into a soft, powdery silver. There’s a fringed ivory silk evening scarf draped casually around his neck (the two horizontal lines of fringing are
perfectly
level) and a snowy linen handkerchief juts in two crisp peaks from the appropriate pocket. Even his eyes are black and white. There’s something very classic and even pre-war about the whole look – a touch of the Café Royal – and he’s a handsome devil. The kind of man who looks as though he smiles for a living, if you know what I mean.

For now his face is pale, and deeply shadowed by the overhead floods, but you can easily imagine what the finished effect will be like when the warm glow of the footlights is doing its job and he’s properly made up; you can just see how, when he shoots his cuffs and suddenly glances up at the house like that, the forbidding black glass of his eyes will shine and melt. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if several women in the audience find themselves shifting slightly in their seats as his gaze brushes theirs – but then I would imagine that’s the whole idea.

The man takes a pace forward, and stops. In the middle of the stage is a large object about the size and shape of a telephone box, draped in some kind of silver silk or satin-like fabric. He looks at it, and then at a wristwatch that he pulls out of his jacket. Then he walks offstage.

Then he walks on again.

He does this three times in a row.

From the way he walks, it would seem that there’s some kind of imaginary music playing in this man’s head. Something that he’s trying to time his moves to, and that only he can hear.

The fourth time he makes his entrance he seems satisfied, and the frown that was beginning to collect on his forehead is ironed away. He hits a mark just down left of centre, about four strides away from the silver-draped box; then, still clearly timing each move to some imaginary music, he swings his top hat from his right hand smartly up onto his head and taps it into place. Turning sideways to show the stalls his profile, he raises first one hand and then the next, smoothly unbuttoning each of his gloves in turn. He removes them – all the while keeping his eyes moving along the rows of darkened seats in the stalls, one eyebrow ever so slightly raised – and then turns square to the audience again and cradles the gloves in his now-bare hands. He looks at them tenderly, as if they were a pair of innocent creatures that he was about to restore to their well-earned freedom. Then with a swift, jerking flourish, he brings his hands sharply down level with his crotch – and immediately flings them up and out to his right and left. Inexplicably, they are now empty, and the pair of white doves which ought to be circling high above his head in noisy bewilderment are nowhere to be seen.

He leaves his hands hanging in the air for a moment, and raises that black and questioning eyebrow ever so slightly higher. Then (without pause or explanation) he makes a pair of devil’s horns with the pinkie and first finger of his left hand. He inserts these fingers into his full-lipped mouth, and mimes a loud, commanding wolf whistle.

This silence produces a sound.

A young woman enters, upstage right. She is wearing slacks, three-inch black
glacee
heels – the source of the sound – a tight powder-blue sweater, and an even tighter smile. She’s short – five foot two, I would say, if she took off those shoes. She ignores the large box and walks straight to her mark with exaggeratedly tiny and hip-swinging steps, as if her knees and ankles were tightly hobbled. She’s looking distinctly ill-at-ease under the heavy foundation she’s wearing, and the harsh overhead lights aren’t doing her scraped back bottle-blonde hair any favours.

She waits.

Without looking round, the man pulls the silk scarf from his neck and prepares to throw it over his head. The woman gawkily prepares to catch it, clearly unsure of whether she’ll be able to manage this simple task. The man’s eyebrow goes up again – straight to the lads in the gods, this time – and with another quick flash of his hands he tosses the balled scarf high in the air, upstage right. His assistant’s eager fingers splay and reach, but instead of gathering an arc of flying silk, they find only air; his hands, meanwhile, are once again elegantly empty. The young woman looks confused, but he doesn’t wait; already his top hat is off and twirling in his hands, the oval of its scarlet lining a sudden and demanding mouth. As if he were playing with a favourite dog, he makes two slow swinging right-hand passes across the front of his body, clearly indicating that he is going to toss the hat stage left for the woman to retrieve. She anxiously totters across the stage behind him, readying herself for her task. He keeps his eyes on his audience – and then on the third swing turns his well-tailored back on them and converts the pass with the hat (which he now swaps deftly into his left hand) into a slow upward diagonal. He does this twice, moving very slowly and clearly for everybody’s benefit – the dog’s included – and still exactly in time with his silent music. Neither he nor the woman has yet looked at the draped box. The hat is now down right of his body; suddenly, he double-times his gesture, flashing the hat up and down and up again, keeping strict time with three peremptory accents from an unheard snare drum – and as the girl stumbles forward to catch it on the expected third pass, both of his hands are suddenly up and to his left and empty again. The hat, of course, is nowhere to be seen; upstage, the girl gives a pantomime flinch of female failure to the sound of an accusing stroke from an imagined cymbal, and the man is already turning downstage again, with both eyebrows raised this time. He brings his empty hands slowly down, making a dismissive shrugging gesture that displays just how well cut that dinner jacket of his is across the shoulders. There is a momentary pause, in which he snaps the snowy linen handkerchief from his breast pocket, wipes the sweat from both his hands and then in three swift successive folds and one sudden landing swoop tucks it back whence it came, its two crisp peaks apparently – and inexplicably – as immaculate as they were before. All of this happens a bit faster than the eye can quite follow, but then his hands slow down again, as if they were considering what to do next. He shifts his attention back up to the gallery again, and then back down to the circle, and then finally to one particular seat in the middle of the stalls. His expression, though still officially deadpan, seems to shift; he flashes a look upstage at his assistant, and then back out at the empty seat. He is making, it would seem, a choice.

She, meanwhile, tries to look foolish and unconcerned at the same time.

In response to this slight shift in his expression – his brows furrow again, ever so slightly – it would seem that the silent music has just changed key. The man reaches slowly into his right trouser pocket, and quite matter-of-factly produces a small coil of rope; soft, and scarlet. Snake-like. He looks down at it as if this prop were an old and valued friend, and gestures elegantly towards it with his other, empty hand. Then, having now apparently decided what to do about his problem upstage, he once again shapes the relevant fingers into a pair of horns and inserts them into his mouth. Evidently the wolf whistle is louder and even more commanding this time, because the problem springs nervously into action. She spins, and looks upstage. She doesn’t do it that well, but you can see that she is pretending that the mystery object under the silken drapes is now being wheeled on from the wings. You can also see, from the way that the man now strides smartly across to downstage right, uncoiling and coiling the rope as he goes, that the music has changed tempo as well as key – something warmer and brighter seems to be suggested; something a bit more
promising
, if you know what I mean. The girl steps slightly to one side; clearly, whoever is wheeling the mystery object on from the wings is rotating it as it comes, and she needs to keep out of their way. As soon as it has come to a halt, and the man has coiled and recoiled his rope to his satisfaction, he beckons her over, indicating that she should hold out both her hands in front of her with her wrists pressed together. She hesitates, and looks a little worried, but then does what she is told, spreading her fingers out in a double fan. Without hesitating, the man swiftly and efficiently binds her wrists – twice round clockwise, once over and through – and then –