Chalcot Crescent (22 page)

I know Henry was born on 5 November, a date embedded in my mind, which put his Sun in Scorpio, sign of the dictator. That figured. The emotional manipulator, the creature that stings itself if it has nothing else to sting, even forgetting it was Guy Fawkes Day, dedicated to the patron saint of explosives. Karl’s birthday was
June. He was a Gemini. Which twin were you kissing? You never knew. That was part of the charm. If I was going to be imprisoned in my rooms I could look up the ephemeris of the planet’s places on Google and cast Henry’s horoscope. I bet they wouldn’t like that in the New Republic; altogether too Witch of Endory.

‘So see you later, Gran,’ said Amos. He didn’t swear in Henry’s presence, I noticed. Oaths will not be a feature in the New Republic. The New Republic is going to be a lot worse than NUG. Henry must be stopped. Victor must be warned that Henry is not a desirable guest in his house, that Henry is a snake in the grass, an adder at the breast, a worm in the apple of NUG, even if Victor does grow pink ready-to-carve human meat in vats. Nobody’s perfect.

‘Alligator,’ I say. They don’t know the reference, but at least they go.

I tried the lock in the front door but it was well and truly glued. If it had been me I wouldn’t have done it so well that it actually worked. Liddy, Amy’s grandmother, was good at practical things. She once complained I was a bodger. It is absurd to carry these grudges, these memories back to the other side of the grave. Plan A had just been to defy Henry and leave by the front door, but no. So there was nothing but Plan B. I waited. I watched from my back window the movements between the rows of beanpoles, which during the next fifteen minutes were plentiful. Back and forth they ran, back and forth, shadowy, diving and ducking, as if they were ghostly characters in some computer game. There had been quite a wind in the night and a few more bean leaves had been swept away, so cover was not as good as it had been. Bet they hadn’t thought of that. I waited until movement had ceased, the dark forms were gone, and all was quiet upstairs, when I reckoned they had all left No. 5 to set about their baleful ‘operation’, whatever it was, and I hoped it was minor, not major. More like a procedure.

I then set about climbing the stairs. Up to the half-landing is fine, just a bit painful, but then the stairs turn a corner and that’s a problem. I have to have something to hold on to and there is nothing. My balance is not too good, and I fear falling backwards. I hate being old. I am not yet accustomed to it. If I do the stairs on
hands and knees and use a cushion so the contact with knee and floor is not accompanied by dreadful crumbling noises from within, as if something internal is splintering, that might work. I try. I can. There is usually a way out. I need to get to Polly, who will get me to Venetia.

Once on level ground the passage from the landing to the room where once Karl and I had our bedroom is no problem.

I should have had my knees replaced when I could have, but I put it off and put it off and one day there was no money left to go private and the NHS had ceased to do hips and knees. All services for geriatrics had seized up. What small money there was, what few skills left after the Great Immigration, when so many in the health services went home to practise medicine in their own countries, were reserved for the fertile and economically productive. It made sense: there were fewer of us old ones left to stare forlornly into space in nursing homes, longing for an end nature had devised for us and the doctors barred to us. A long life expectancy had ceased to be a matter of competition between the nations.

And yes, the wall is a mess. They have indeed broken through to No. 5. They have not bothered to sweep up plaster, or square off the ragged hole they have made. They have taken down the painting on the wall – a Samuel Palmer fake – and leaned it against the wall facing outwards, where it could get kicked or damaged. Anyone with any sensitivity would have placed it facing inwards. But then the New Republic will probably ban art as frivolous. I wish I could remember what NUG’s view of art is – I get fact and fiction blurred in my mind. Is Venetia really having an exhibition at the Medici Gallery under NUG’s auspices, or was that just something I wrote? Sometimes what I invent comes true anyway. Friends say I am prophetic but I just think I’m a good guesser. Anyway I take time
to put the painting so that it faces inward and is safer. It may be a fake but sometimes the skill that goes into a fake is greater than whatever went into the original: it’s just the motive one suspects – money rather than art. I suppose it makes a difference. It’s meant to.

I am aware that I must hurry: they may be back any minute. I go through the hole into No. 5. I need to get out of here. It’s the living room of my one-time neighbours, Timothy and Sandra Croxton. I haven’t seen them for some time – I thought they were away, but I think Amos was right. They are gone. The walls are bare of pictures; none of their nice Danish furniture is left. I hope it was not the bailiffs, and they managed to take the stuff with them when they skipped the moon.

Go back a hundred years and this street was full of couples who skipped the moon, that is to say failed to pay the rent and left secretly by night. Nothing changes. The rent became the mortgage, that was all. A diet of avocados and lemon veal took over from mutton and potatoes, but I daresay the sum of human happiness, human anxiety, remained about the same. I wish they’d said goodbye, though. I wonder why not? Shame? The security cameras? I wouldn’t have snitched on them, warned the Neighbourhood Watch. I am a loyal kind of person, to friends, family, neighbours. I think. I wonder how much I want Venetia to stay with Victor because of my second-hand access to the Grade 1 CiviStore. Coffee and rice and all things nice.

Thinking about the Neighbourhood Watch, how did Amy come to have house plans for the Crescent in her possession? Is she one of the trusted senior watchers? Or is she an infiltrator, a sleeper, an entryist? These hard-left parties changed names and aims after the end of the Cold War, but never really went away. NUG is shamelessly Gramsciist, its aim the destruction of the old institutions, by
persuasion through redefinition rather than force, and the collapse of the bourgeoisie. The New Republic? A reflowering of Marxism, like a rose in its autumn blooming, richly fertilized by the end of capitalism as foretold by the master? No, I think perhaps, judging from Henry, something more Stalinist in its nature, favouring direct action, the literal elimination of enemies.

What I don’t like is the armchair that stands by itself in the all but empty room, and the table next to it on which is laid out a few reels of that sticky stuff that my father called ‘bodge tape’ and the writers of serial-killer thrillers call ‘duct tape’, plus various lengths of cord and a pair of handcuffs. Someone, it seems to me, is going to be held here captive. Yes, indeed, things are hotting up. A kidnapping? Thank God I see no instruments of torture. I don’t see Ethan or Amos standing for that, though I’m not so sure about Amy. Who? Victor? Dr Yuk, as excoriated by Redpeace? No, that is too unlikely even for me. I think the cloning business is just a diversion, for the likes of Edgar to take seriously. I think Henry has bigger plans, greater ambitions. He’s like Yeltsin, waiting in the wings for Gorbachev to be deposed, so he can sweep back on a tank and retake Moscow.

Getting down the stairs of No. 5 is not easy; there’s the same bend in the stairs to negotiate as at No. 3, but I realize I can put my feet at a sideways angle and stand on tiptoe as the right foot goes down, and then swing the left foot as far to the left as I can before putting it down, and thus, absurdly, descend. As I say, if you want to do something enough, there is usually a way. But I am also on the side of those
Carmageddon
makers, who aim their cars at little old ladies, the LOLs, and leave them as a splodge of red blood on the ground. That’s fun: the green blood of alien life forms, legitimate prey, just isn’t the same.

I get out through the back door of No. 5 and cross beneath the arch of beanpoles. The ground is really muddy after last night’s rain. The potato plants are in flower: when they begin to die off it is time to lift the crop, before the blight gets to them. Phosphate rock for fertilizer has to be imported so the crop does tend to struggle. Neighbourhood Watch is setting up some intricate organic waste scheme which should help but does tend to be smelly. I go through the back door of 7 Rothwell Street and find that empty too, with the signs of a swift withdrawal – however will we get our potatoes enriched at this rate? Our sewers will be empty – and go out the front door. The CiviCam dangles from its wires. Out of action. There’s a CiviSecure notice saying it has been reported and will be back in action within twelve hours, but nobody really believes it, or fills in the Security Postbox forms (
Working For A More Satisfied Community
) to report malefactors.

I half expect a car to come racing round the corner and down the road to knock me over and kill me, but all looks peaceful. I have an odd feeling that had I come out on to Chalcot Crescent exactly that might have happened. As it is, I escape unseen. But who would want to kill me? I’m an old lady and harmless, though unnecessarily taking up the nation’s resources. I know nothing; I am from Barcelona. I am no more worth killing than is Polly. I am Victor’s
mother-in-law, and that should keep me safe. Unless Victor is the source of all the trouble: it is Victor who is to be sat duct-taped in an armchair at No. 5 and wait – till what? His ransom is paid? That seems possible. Though why would his family, my family, collude in the crime? Mervyn, conspicuous by his absence, might be the one to ask. And perhaps I know more than I think I do? The absence of torture implements is no guarantee that they’re not hidden in a cupboard. Oh, the fevered imagination of the old! If only I hadn’t had a life so full of surprises I could view it with more equanimity. It is just that in one’s experience so much of what is imagined turns out to be true. It’s almost as if one thinks of it, and lo, it happens. The Shock, the Crunch, the Crisis, the Squeeze, the ‘Recovery’, the Fall and the Bite, are in this case all my fault. The world unfolds before one in the way one expects. Perhaps we all have our own individual universe?

I will not bore you with an account of my walk to Mornington Crescent where Polly, Corey and the girls live, other than it was long, tiring and painful, and whenever I wanted someone’s low wall to sit upon and rest, there was none. I got heart pains, and however much one thinks one welcomes death, heart pains, though usually indigestion, can give one a nasty turn. But they went away.

They live in the bottom third of a tall London house not unlike the one I live in, but rather darker, and with a bad damp problem. Mornington Crescent, like Chalcot Crescent, was built around 1820, but intended for a grander clientele, and should have looked out, magnificently, one-sidedly, on to the greenery, space and elegance of Harrington Square. Now it looks out on to the concrete slab that is the back of the old art deco cigarette factory, with its Egyptian motifs and its place in the guidebooks. The building has been converted to offices – which these days stand mostly empty –
but the façade has been preserved, with a great bronze cat on either side of the wide steps, still staring balefully out at passers-by. It is a beautiful and eccentric building from the front, but from the back an ugly, looming, squalid nightmare, cutting out light and air to poor Mornington Crescent. Some developer, back in 1926, got permission to fill in an available space, and the residents at the time were too poor to object, or perhaps notice.

In the days of my wealth I was always trying to persuade Polly to move somewhere healthier, but she refused the offer of my tainted wealth. I can’t remember quite what it was that tainted it – I think it was because I had stuck with mainstream commercial publishers and had eschewed the feminist presses. Something like that. But there was always something, with both Venetia and Polly. As there had been with Jane, Fay and myself, when it came to our mother Margaret. Namely, why did you leave our father?

Perhaps with the New Republic divorce will be banned. Or, if not, marriage, for that seldom happens in the first place these days, but at any rate leaving your partner once you have children. But then, of course, who would have children?

I forgot to look at Henry’s feet to see if they are exceptionally large. I have no doubt he will be in my life again – I have to go home sometime, somehow effect an entry – and no doubt will have an opportunity to find out.

‘Mum,’ cried Polly,’ did you walk all this way, or did somebody drop you off?’

‘I walked,’ I say.

Polly is getting on for fifty. I keep expecting to see her at around fifteen, with her frizzy, fulsome hair, and her little rosebud disapproving mouth, so like my big sister Jane’s, and the slight figure and the worried look, which actually is less worried now she has
something to worry about – namely two daughters caught up in a dangerous political movement of which she knows nothing. If she was fifteen I’d be in my forties, with good knees, and would have been over to Mornington Crescent in fifteen minutes, not an hour and a half. Polly’s on half-time, now the schools open only three days a week to save power and staffing costs. She works far less hard than she used to and is much better-tempered as a consequence. With unemployment at 60 per cent there are enough people at home to look after the children and indeed teach them. Literacy rates have soared since there’s been less schooling.

‘Why didn’t you ring me?’ she asks. ‘I’d have come over to fetch you, and I would have tidied up.’

The flat is in a mess. Nobody bothers to put things away, or arrange anything in a neat pile so it gives the impression, however false, of order and good cheer. This is not living, this is home as base. There are piles of clothes everywhere and Corey has been mending his motorbike in the kitchen. It is not in Polly’s nature to tidy up any more than it is Corey’s. She is too busy with what is in her head and he with what is not in his. The girls attend to their bodies and not what is around them. A shortage of water and light does not help. But I fear Polly is depressed. And there is something she is not telling me. She does not quite look me in the eye.