The Keys to the Street (2 page)

A hand came from behind and went over his mouth. He wasn’t afraid, he knew who it was.

Gupta said,

“Are you crazy?”

“I’m not well.”

Even in the dark he could see Gupta’s bloody teeth when he spoke. They looked as if he’d been chomping on raw steak, but in fact it was betel he chewed. All the money Hob had was exchanged for what Gupta produced, a plastic bag holding a small block of something like a white pebble but rough and irregular, not smoothed by the sea. Not for the first time he thought of his strength and Gupta’s frailty and of the other white stones in the yogurt carton, enough to keep him well for a long time. But it was no use. Retribution would be swift. He’d carried out some of it for them, so he knew. They’d start by breaking his legs. He doubted if he would even get beyond the first thump of his fist into Gupta’s skinny belly.

It was strange, he had stopped trying to understand it, the state was so awful, so why did he want to prolong it? He always did. That uncle—or one of them—would have said it was like banging your head against a wall, it was so good when you stopped. But that wasn’t quite how he felt; rather, as if the pain and the state, the panic and the total meaningless of everything, became pleasure when he knew he had the means of ending them. The state became almost enjoyable and he walked inside his glass bubble, rolling his head and mouthing something like a smile.

If he headed for Chester Road and the Inner Circle he would be bound to encounter the police, so he turned back. But instead of climbing the Cumberland Gate once more, he kept close along the dark grass under the hedge, aware now that he was cold. The night was cold as nights in April are. The sweat that kept on breaking out
on his face and chest dried cold and salty. He could taste the salt when he licked his dry upper lip.

Soon, if the state were too long prolonged, trembling would start and the sick feeling and the great weakness as if he were aging years in as many minutes. It was a matter of striking the happy medium. Again he climbed a spiked railing, this time at the Gloucester Gate, and this time it was harder, he was an even older man with worse arthritis and more frightened bones.

He got over the gate and waited at the lights at the top of Albany Street. Some seconds, a whole minute probably, passed before he understood that the lights had changed from red to green and back to red again. A solitary car stopped and waited. He went across, holding on to the wall of the bridge now, just another drunk to passersby, turning clumsily into Park Village East and pushing open the gate into the ruined garden.

They were doing up the house that loomed above him in darkness. Its windows were gone, leaving black pits. The builders’ materials lay in heaps, timber, bricks, a ladder. He nearly blundered into a concrete mixer, a thing like a great pale zoo animal with heavy backside and tiny stupid head. Down the slope, black but with the gleam of water in its depths, lay the Grotto. He scrambled down, scratching his hands on brambles, trying to avoid the coils of barbed wire. There, at the bottom, his seat on the coping lit by a thin shaft from a lamp on the bridge, he shivered and hunched his body before feeling in the pocket of his jacket for his materials.

They were kept in a red velvet drawstring bag, the kind of thing a box containing a ring or necklace is put into in a jeweler’s shop. He had found it in a waste bin in York Terrace, where the rubbish is of high quality. From the bag he took first another find, the metal rose from a galvanized iron watering can, then a tin lid that by chance—he had searched for quite a long time—exactly fitted over the rim of the rose, the screwtop from a vodka bottle with
Purveyors to the Imperial Russian Court
and the dates
1887–1917
printed on it in red. He
pulled out a drinking straw still in its plastic wrapping he had helped himself to from the counter at the refreshment place near the Broad Walk, and a cigarette lighter.

First he took the white crystalline substance he had bought from Gupta between finger and thumb. His hand was shaking but that didn’t matter, as all he had to do was crumble the substance up. He dropped it through the neck of the rose onto its perforated base. Then he screwed the vodka cap, into which he had bored two holes about a centimeter apart, onto the neck. He removed the drinking straw from its wrapping, cut it in half with nail scissors, and inserted the two halves to a length of about three centimeters into the holes. It was just light enough to see to do this, but he could have done it in pitch darkness.

Having checked by feel that the straw halves were inserted to the correct length, very important this, he struck the cigarette lighter and set the flame to the perforations on which the rock rested. The second it caught he closed the lid over the base of the rose, took the straws into his mouth, and drew in a deep inhalation. At this, the first draw, he always made a noise. It was a sound of joy, of orgasmic happiness, but to others it would have seemed like a groan of despair.

No one heard him. There was no one to hear. When educating him to work for them, Lew had told him jumbo took just ten seconds to reach the brain. He told him it would change him from one kind of person into another kind and he had been right. Hob grunted his satisfaction. A car passed along the bridge and the trees shook a little. The state began to recede like something evil in a dream being sucked away out of a door. It struggled as it went, but the door closed and clouds of warmth filled its space, and sweet singing and hope. He closed his eyes. Once, when he first used the watering can rose, he had simply turned it upside down and inhaled through the perforations, but he found you wasted a lot that way. Waste was a crime.

After a while he removed the vodka cap from the neck of the rose, shook out the rose and the lid, put them back into the jewel bag, and threw the straws away into the bushes. He had begun to feel strong and immensely happy. That was just the start.

Traffic was at its lightest, no heavy lorries or containers, only private cars. There are always some private cars. There are always people in Camden High Street, no matter what the hour. After midnight, for a while, London throbs softly but it still throbs. Chemical lamps color the darkness greenish-white and dull orange, and the traffic lights change from green to amber to red to amber again and to green silently and often to an empty street. At such a place, where the lights changed to no purpose to a deserted roadway, he crossed to Albert Road, to Parkway. When he was well he was a different person and he walked springily.

The different person, the person who was not in a state, was a joker, facetious, a user of peculiar slang. Everything made him laugh. He was strong, he could do anything, he could certainly do the job for which he had received half-payment. The watch he had often nearly sold but had not yet sold told him it was twelve minutes past one.

The mark was due to arrive in London on the nine twenty-five train from Shrewsbury, which comes into Euston Station at one-fourteen. Euston was less than a mile away, the nearest of all the London stations. If the train was on time and a taxi was waiting, he had just enough time to make it to St. Mark’s Crescent—nice time, in fact. A mark living in St. Mark’s Crescent was something else to make him laugh, and he did so, but quietly, to himself.

He walked up Gloucester Avenue, took the fork into Regent’s Park Road and up the fork to the right. The park was invisible, though lying only a few yards behind the tree-shaded walls. Dark shadows and leaves that scarcely rustled. Dustbins awaiting emptying; a cat that padded as silently as the place was silent, listened,
froze, smelled or intuited him, and streaked, quick as a weasel, over the wall.

Lights were on in the houses, but not many. There were no lights on any floor of the house that was his destination. It had a dingy front garden, thick with weed bushes. He knew some of these were brambles because they caught on his clothes as he dropped down among them. A briar tugged at the back of his hand, scratching and puckering, making a zip fastener of blood on the skin.

It was so quiet that he heard the taxi when it was still in Regent’s Park Road. He felt very calm and happy, wishing only that he had someone to talk to and clown with, maybe put on his hit-man act, talking like a TV actor. The taxi turned the corner and pulled up outside the garden where he was. Its light shone right on him, into his eyes. He kept as low down as he could get. He heard the exchange.

“Take three.”

“Thanks very much, guv.”

The gate opened. The taxi started, moved, began to turn. If the driver had waited till the front door came open he didn’t know what he’d have done. A suitcase was pushed in onto the path and the gate closed behind it and its owner with a soft click. The lights of the taxi dwindled, disappeared, and the throb of its engine faded.

He stood up and used his bare hands, first his hands, then his feet. One over the mouth from behind, a stranglehold armlock to bring him down, and when he was on the ground, the kicking. Not enough to kill or permanently disable but enough to injure, break a couple of the mark’s ribs, maybe not improve the future prospects of his spleen. Some dental work would probably also be needed.

He enjoyed it. He admired himself for doing it so well, particularly his skill in doing it in silence. Long practice and the use of his hands had ensured not a sound escaped from that mouth out of which blood now trickled in a thin stream. He knelt down. There
was nothing in his brief about robbing the man, but when you came to think of it the fee was laughable. He was entitled. He put his hand inside the jacket, felt in the pocket, and found a wallet. Credit cards were no use to him, there was only one thing he wanted to buy and neither Carl nor Gupta would take Visa. Ten pounds, twenty and another twenty … Joy began to fill the spaces of his body with warmth. Eighty pounds. He stuffed it into his pocket alongside the red velvet bag.

Then, because he liked a joke and was feeling cheerful, he opened the suitcase and took a look inside. Not surprisingly, it was full of clothes. The surprise was that they were women’s, mostly women’s underwear. It now came back to him that he had heard there was something funny about the mark, though he’d half forgotten what.

He set about hanging the stuff on the bushes, red silk bikini pants, French knickers, a black bra, a black lace nightie. It looked as if a couple of girls were camping there and had done their washing before they kipped down for the night. Whatever the name of the black see-through thing was, a sort of all-in-one with a fastening in the crotch, he didn’t know, but he draped it over the gate and dropped a couple of suspender belts on the mark’s recumbent body.

The faint groaning coming from that half-open mouth meant it was dangerous to remain any longer. He left the garden, licking the blood off the scratch on the back of his hand, walking fast, going in the opposite direction this time, toward Primrose Hill. His spirits had begun to sink. Lew had told him about the ten-second effect but said nothing about depression coming back half an hour later. It was too late now. Gupta would no longer be among the Chinese trees, but Carl or Lew might be on the Hill or the Macclesfield Bridge. He headed that way, his gains in his pocket.

“Jumbo, jumbo,” muttered Hob, and then he sang it to keep his spirits up. “Jumbo, jumbo …”

2

T
he letter came the day she left. There was a postcard from her grandmother, a bill for water, and this letter in a brown envelope with the Harvest Trust logo that looked like a scarlet mushroom, but was not of course that, was something quite other than that. She postponed opening it. Her grandmother’s postcard was from a place called Jokkmokk in the north of Sweden. It said,
Dear Mary, I shall be back in London next Thursday, by which time you will be settled in Park Village. Will phone. Surprising heat here and midnight sun. Much love.…

“I’ll want a check for your half of the water,” Alistair said, very sour and cross, truculent with resentment.

Mary said nothing about having paid all the electricity bill herself. He had got hold of the other envelope and was looking at the red logo.

“May I have my letter, please?”

He handed it to her reluctantly. “They want more, I suppose.”

“Very unlikely.” She was trying to keep everything she said to him brief, civil, equable. The rows were in the past. “It will just be the update. They keep in touch.”

“I hope it’s to say he’s dead,” said Alistair viciously.

It was hard to stay calm in the face of this. “Please don’t say that.”

“It would be the best and ultimate way to show you how you’ve wasted your time and rubbished your body.”

“I’m going to finish packing,” she said.

He followed her into the bedroom. There were two open suitcases
on the bed, one half-filled with her clothes. She put the letter and the postcard on top of a blue T-shirt and laid her trouser suit, folded with tissue, on top of that. A week had gone by since she had slept in that bed with him. He slept in it and she had the sofa-bed in the living room. It was easier that way, if her aim was a quiet life for what was left of it for the two of them together. She found her checkbook in a drawer and wrote him a check for half the water rate.