31 Dream Street (3 page)

3

Con pulled the glossy brochure out of the envelope and flicked through it impatiently, his eyes taking in the images a second at a time. Blue skies, palm trees, creamy beaches. But this wasn’t a travel brochure. This was a brochure for the Right Path Flight School in Durban, South Africa. Con gazed at crop-haired men in icy white shirts and epaulettes, sitting in tiny cockpits lined with a thousand buttons and lights, knobs and levers, and felt a thrill of excitement. Then, before anyone could ask him what he was looking at, he slid the brochure back into the envelope and headed for the eighth floor.

The
Vogue
fashion department looked like a normal office. It had desks and computers and printers and wastepaper bins. It had a suspended ceiling and fluorescent lighting and phones ringing and fax machines chirruping. It looked like a normal office, but it absolutely wasn’t.

Con partly relished the point in the day when he was called upon to push his trolley through the
Vogue
fashion department and partly dreaded it. He liked looking at the girls, rail-thin, delicate as wisps of smoke with their serious clothes and their perfect skin. He liked the
way they sat behind their desks, slender legs knitted together like vines, tap-tapping at their keyboards with lean fingers. He liked their flat, pointy shoes and their strange accessories, the scarves and rings and tiny cardigans, so different to the girls he knew from home. And he liked the way they talked, their husky Marlboro Light voices and the peculiar shapes they made out of ordinary words. They appeared to him like people from dreams – half-formed, semi-opaque, not quite human. They fascinated him. And they repulsed him. It annoyed him that they existed so separately to him. It wound him up that he could move through them with his trolley, invisible, even to the ugly ones. They passed him their packages and parcels; they asked him stupid questions about costs and timings; they addressed him only via pieces of paper.

In his world, outside the gilded gates of the Condé Nast building, Con was a player. He met his friends in the pub on a Friday night and girls,
good-looking
girls, shimmied around him, glanced against him, willed him to pay them attention. Here he was just the post boy.

One of these wraith-like girls approached him now, her hand clutching a large white Jiffy bag. She had fine blonde hair, the colour of rice paper, and pale waxy skin. She was wearing a biscuit-coloured suede waistcoat with a shaggy trim over a grey lace top. Her eyes were icy blue. Con had never seen her before.

‘Erm,’ she started, handing him the envelope, ‘this has to go recorded. Will it get there by Friday?’

Con took the package from her hand and examined
it. It was addressed to someone in South London. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘should be OK.’

‘Excellent,’ she said. And then, miraculously, she smiled. Not one of the smiles that these well-brought-up girls usually served him with, not the practised coordination of facial muscles to force the mouth into an upturned crescent, but a proper burst of sunshine. ‘Thank you,’ she said, still smiling. ‘Sorry… what’s your name?’

Con felt a flush of surprise rise from his midriff towards his temples. He hesitated for a second, not entirely sure of the answer to that question. ‘Connor,’ he said eventually. ‘Con.’

‘Con,’ she repeated, cocking her head slightly to one side. ‘I’m Daisy.’

Daisy, he thought. Perfect. That’s what she looked like. A colourless, uncomplicated flower, tiny and well formed. ‘That’s nice,’ he said, feeling the heat of his embarrassment starting to fade.

‘Thank you,’ she smiled again. Her teeth were slightly crooked, but very white. ‘My sisters are called Mimosa and Camellia. I must have been a very plain baby.’

Con laughed. He noticed a girl sitting at the desk nearest to him look up at the sound of his laughter. Her face registered a situation she didn’t quite comprehend. She looked away again.

Daisy said, ‘It’s my first day today. I’m in charge of letters and things so you’ll probably find me bugging you about stuff.’

Con shook his head. ‘That’s OK,’ he said.

‘Good,’ she said. And then she went back to her desk.

Con dropped the white Jiffy bag onto his trolley and pushed it towards the doors at the far end. As he passed Daisy’s desk she looked up at him and grinned. She mouthed the word ‘Bye’ and waved at him. He waved back, his heart leaping around in his chest like a wild salmon.

As the door closed behind him and he found himself in the corridor outside, he breathed out and leaned against the wall. He tried to decipher what had just happened from the mixed messages his head and his heart were sending each other, but none of it made any sense. He had a curious feeling that something significant had just happened, that his life had reached a mini-roundabout, that suddenly he had options. And all because a beautiful girl called Daisy had smiled at him.

He pulled himself upright at the sound of the lift pinging and wheeled his trolley quickly towards the features department.

4

It had snowed the night before, and Silversmith Road was gleaming with ice, so when Leah left her house on Thursday morning and saw Old Skinny Guy lying face-down on the pavement, his arms and legs spread out as if he were making angels in the snow, her immediate assumption was that he’d slipped and fallen.

Leah saw Old Skinny Guy leave his house most mornings. He had a very set routine. At eight o’clock he started to leave the house. It took him approximately three minutes to make his way down the front steps, leaning heavily on a gnarled mahogany cane as he went. At the bottom of the steps he would stop for a while, his hand resting on the head of a plaster lion. He would then remove from the pocket of his grey tweed overcoat (worn through all four seasons) a voluminous white handkerchief and rub it vigorously back and forth across the end of his nose. No matter the weather or the time of year, the old man always had a streaming nose. He would then fold the enormous handkerchief back into a triangle, tuck it into his overcoat pocket and begin his ritual inspection of the pavement outside his house. Any stray sheets of newspaper or cigarette butts were dispatched into the gutter with a firm thwack of his walking stick, then he would be on his way.

‘Hello,’ she made her way tentatively across the slushy road. ‘Hello. Are you OK?’

Old Skinny Guy failed to respond in any way. Leah leaned down and shouted into his ear. ‘Are you OK? Do you need any help?’ The man lay motionless and Leah began to suspect that there might be something seriously wrong. She picked up his hand and felt around the ribs and nodules of his wrist for a pulse. Something juddered beneath the tips of her fingers like a truck going over a speed bump. Leah couldn’t tell if it was the clunk of the old man’s blood or some kind of subcutaneous carbuncle. She let his hand drop and glanced at the front door of the old man’s house.

She clambered up from her knees. ‘I’m going to get someone,’ she shouted. ‘I won’t be long.’

She hurried towards the Peacock House and banged loudly against the front door. A figure appeared through the mottled stained glass of the front door and then he was there, in front of her, Young Skinny Guy, all sideburns and hair and enquiring, slightly panicky facial expressions.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Er, the old man,’ she began, ‘he’s there,’ she pointed behind her. ‘I think he might be dead.’

‘Oh, Jesus.’ He peered over his shoulder at the prone figure on the pavement. ‘Oh, shit. Let me… God. I need shoes.’ He glanced down at a pair of unfeasibly long and bony feet. ‘Hang on. Just a sec. Hold on.’ He turned to go, but then spun round again. ‘Have you called an ambulance?’

‘No.’ Leah shook her head.

‘Right. Maybe that’s the thing to do. I reckon. Right. Shoes. Back in a tick.’

She was in the middle of trying to explain exactly what was wrong with the old man to a woman with a northern accent who’d answered the phone quickly enough to restore Leah’s faith in the emergency services, when Young Skinny Guy lolloped back down the hallway wearing a pair of gumboots. He followed her down the front steps and out onto the pavement. ‘He’s just sort of flat on his face,’ Leah said to the operator. ‘I’m not sure if he’s breathing or not.’ She glanced at the skinny guy who was crouched over the old man with his ear to his mouth. He shrugged.

‘No,’ continued Leah, ‘we’re not sure. He’s very old.’

‘Ninety-seven,’ said the skinny guy, picking up the old man’s wrist and feeling around for a pulse. ‘He’s ninety-seven.’

‘Jesus,’ she said to the operator, ‘he’s ninety-seven.’

Gus Veldtman was pronounced dead half an hour later and taken away to Barnet General Hospital, where it would later be ascertained that he had died of a massive heart attack. Leah and the skinny guy stood together on the pavement and watched the ambulance as it pulled away. There was something stultifyingly tragic about the silence as the ambulance headed slowly towards the High Road without sirens or flashing lights. There was no hurry. Being dead wasn’t an emergency.

‘Well,’ said Leah, looking at her watch, ‘I guess I’d better get on.’

‘Off to work?’

‘Yes,’ she nodded, ‘I run a shop, up on the Broadway.’

‘Oh, really,’ he said, ‘what sort of shop?’

‘It’s a gift shop,’ she smiled, ‘a very
pink
gift shop.’

‘I see,’ he nodded, ‘I see.’

‘So. Is there anything else I can do?’ she said hopelessly.

‘No.’ He ran the palm of his hand across his face. ‘No. That’s it now, really, isn’t it? I’ll call his relatives. They’ll sort out the rest of it, I suppose. Just got to sort of get on with things, I guess.’ He shrugged and tucked his hands into his pockets. ‘But thanks… sorry, what
is
your name?’

‘Leah.’

‘Leah.’ He nodded. ‘I’m Toby, by the way.’ He offered her a hand the size of a baseball mitt to shake.

‘Toby,’ she repeated, thinking that of all the possible names she’d ever considered for Young Skinny Guy, Toby was absolutely not one of them. ‘Funny,’ she said, ‘I’ve been living across the road from you for nearly three years and I finally get to talk to you because someone dies.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s London for you, I guess.’

Toby nodded his agreement.

‘So, who was he? Gus? I always thought maybe he was your grandfather.’

Toby laughed, nervously. ‘You did?’

‘Yes. But I’m assuming from your reaction to…’ –
she gestured at the spot on the pavement where he’d died – ‘that I was wrong.’

‘No. Gus wasn’t my grandfather. Gus was my sitting tenant.’

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I see. So it’s
your
house?’

‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘It is.’

‘And the other people who live here – they’re…?’

‘My non-sitting tenants.’ Toby was starting to look somewhat strained by the conversation.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Leah. ‘The last thing you need right now is me asking you loads of questions. It’s just – I’m such a nosy person and I’ve been wondering about your house for years, wondering who you all were and how you all knew each other and… well, anyway. I’ll let you get on. And if there’s anything you need, you know where I live. Please – just ask.’

Toby smiled. ‘Thank you. I will. And Leah?’

‘Yes?’

‘Thank you, so much.’

‘What for?’

‘For being here. Thank you.’

He turned then and ascended the steps to his big, peculiar house. Leah turned, too, heading towards the bus stop. Looking back at the cold patch of pavement where old Gus had taken his final breaths, she caught a brief glimpse through the front door of the Peacock House. She saw someone glide from one room to another, like a ghost. The door slammed shut and she snapped out of her reverie. It was time to go to work.

5

Toby pushed open the door to Gus’s bedroom. He’d been into Gus’s bedroom on only two previous occasions – once to check that he was alive when he hadn’t appeared for breakfast one morning (he’d tripped over his shoes and twisted his ankle) and another time to check that he was alive when he hadn’t appeared for dinner one night (he’d accidentally taken a sleeping pill instead of a headache pill and had been asleep in his overcoat and shoes since teatime).

The room was papered with a terrible striped flock in burgundy and cream, and hung with ugly oil paintings lit by brass light fittings. The curtains were slightly flouncy in blue floral chintz and the carpet was a flattened rose-coloured shag pile. A brass chandelier hung from the central ceiling rose. Only one bulb still worked. The double bed sagged in the middle like a hammock and was dressed in burgundy sheets and a thick layer of woolly blankets. The room smelled, not as you might expect, of oldness, or of loneliness, but of malted milk and elderly cat.

The malted milk could be explained by the fact that Gus ate a whole packet of the biscuits every day. The elderly cat couldn’t really be explained at all.

Toby walked towards Gus’s desk. It was positioned
in the window and looked out over the back garden and the asphalt roof of the bathroom below. Gus had a proper old-fashioned typewriter. Toby couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a typewriter. He also had piles of books and paperwork and a collection of old tin snuff boxes in a glass box. There was a manuscript on the desk. It was obviously very old and was covered in faded pencil marks and ink amendments. Gus’s clothes hung in a burr-veneered 1920s wardrobe from heavy wire hangers which jangled together like wind chimes when Toby tugged at a pair of trousers.

And there, at the bottom of the wardrobe, lay a red plastic tray filled with cat litter. A solitary cat poo poked out of the grey nuggets – it was fresh. On the other side of the wardrobe was a green saucer filled with brown pellets, a small bowl full of water and a huge bag of Science Diet.

‘What you doing?’

Toby jumped and clutched his heart.

‘Shit.’

It was Ruby. She was eating a banana.

‘Sorry. I thought you’d heard me come in.’

‘Look at this,’ he said, pointing inside the cupboard.

She peered in over his shoulder. ‘
What!
’ she grimaced.