Mr Toppit (36 page)

I hated her. I hated her more than anyone I had ever met in my whole life. No exceptions.

“I won’t tell Laurie any of this. She has so much on her plate. She would be so disappointed. You have much to set right, Luke. I would start as soon as you can. You know what you must do?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

She looked at her watch. “I must go now. It’s my night off and I’m going to the movies.” Then she turned and left the room.

I felt as if the skin had been stripped very slowly off my body. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I thought of going to talk to Travis but I didn’t want to lay it on him. It wasn’t his fault. I went out into the garden. It was dusk and the light was slanting through the trees—beautiful, but I wished it had been raining. I would have preferred the weather to be more like I felt.

I had never been to the other end of the garden, beyond the manicured bit. You couldn’t see it from the house because it sloped downwards behind the palm trees. It seemed a good place to be because nobody would find me there and I could think, even though that was the last thing I really wanted to do.

Ruthie and Bob didn’t bother to do much watering there. It was dry and hot and airless, and everything crackled under my feet. At the end of the path, there was a long, tall fence, and as I got closer I saw a little, low wooden house behind it. It was rather dilapidated and so hidden away that it had the air of a Hansel-and-Gretel cottage in the woods. I peeked through the slats and could just about see an overgrown garden with some rickety chairs and an old wooden table. There was a metal gate at the other end of the fence and I headed towards it so I could get a better view, but before I got there, a voice barked, “Hey! You! What are you doing?” I jumped. When I got to the gate I saw a very old woman on the other side. If it was possible to lean aggressively on a walker, that was what she was doing.

“I’ve got a shotgun so you’d better watch out,” she shouted.

I found that hard to believe, but in Los Angeles, who knew? I guessed it must be Alma. There had been a lot of promises from Laurie about meeting her but, like the meetings with Wade, they had never materialized. Laurie kept saying Alma was too infirm to leave the guesthouse. I didn’t ask her how she had managed to get her to the studio to do the Alzheimer’s show.

Ridiculously, I put my hands up—I was terrified of doing something else wrong. If Alma shot me, Erica would somehow make it into my fault. “I’m Luke Hayman,” I gabbled. “I’m staying with Laurie. I’m a friend of hers, just walking in the garden. Is that all right?”

“You’re that boy from England.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard about you.” She managed to give the words a faintly sinister ring.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello yourself. You coming in?”

“I’d better not.”

“I want to get a closer look at you.”

“Are you sure?” I would have liked her to sign a legal document saying she had invited me in of her own free will to appease Erica.

She beckoned me closer. “You got to unlock the gate.”

“Do you really have a gun?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

There was a big metal bolt on my side and I pulled it across. The gate creaked open and I went through.

“Now lock it again,” she said. “I don’t trust those pool boys.”

You had to wiggle your hand through the bars of the gate and contort your wrist to pull the bolt back. “You mean Jesus and Ronnie?”

“I hear them coming over the fence at night, them and their wetback friends. They’ll do anything to get into this country.”

My heart sank. I was stuck with a madwoman who thought her garden fence was the Mexican border.

“Sit down,” she said. “I want to look at you.”

I sat by the table and she slowly turned herself round with the walker and eased herself down opposite me.

“I don’t see so well. They call it macular degeneration.”

I was quite impressed. She might have been mad but she had a sense of detail. Then she said something that really threw me: “You a Jew?”

I couldn’t think how to answer.

“I’m not saying you are and I’m not saying you’re not. I’m just asking,” she said.

“I don’t think so. I wouldn’t mind if I was,” I said, rather primly.

She made a humph noise in her throat. “My husband said he wasn’t a Jew but I think he was. He said a lot of things. His family came from Poland. Lot of Jews there. They rounded them up and put them in that Warsaw grotto.”

“I should go,” I said, looking ostentatiously at my watch.

“You’ve only just got here,” she said aggressively. “You worried about the ditch?”

I looked round. Maybe they had built a little moat as an extra precaution to stop her getting out.

“Erica,” she said. She drew out the word, saying each syllable very slowly as if I was very stupid. “Dutch bitch. You get it?”

I got it. It made me laugh very hard. In fact, after what I’d been through with Erica, it seemed the funniest thing I had ever heard.

Alma looked pleased. “I like you,” she said, emphasizing the “you” as if she was singling me out from a group of people. “You want a drink? You’ll have to get it yourself.”

“No, thank you,” I said very quickly, even though she probably meant just water. I wasn’t going to take any chances.

“Why does Laurie talk about you as if you’re the kid in those books?”

“Everybody does.”

“Why?” she said. “Nothing like him. She made me listen to them on tape. Made me fall asleep.” I was beginning to like her. “Who’s that guy anyway, that Mr. Tiptop? I don’t get it.”

It wasn’t that I disagreed with her, but out of family loyalty I thought I should stand up for them a little. “They’re really popular. Lots of people have bought them.”

“Lots of people buy sanitary napkins,” she said dismissively. Then she added, “I’m eighty-three, how about that?”

“That’s quite something.”

“I don’t want to die here,” she said.

“Where do you want to die?” It sounded like a heartless thing to say, but she had started it.

“New Mexico. The mountains.”

“Los Alamos?” I said. She looked surprised. “Laurie told me about it. I saw the show she did.”

“Didn’t much like it when I was there, but I dream about it. I dream a lot. Too much sleeping. All the pills they give me.”

“Why didn’t you like it? It looks beautiful.”

“Too many Jews,” she said. “Still, you got to run them up a flagpole and cheer. They built that bomb, got us out of the war. Nobody said they weren’t smart. My husband was a Communist, thought he was anyway. Lot of them there, too.”

“What happened to him?”

“I hope he’s dead, what he did to us. You should have seen Laurie then. So pretty. Fat little thing. I did her hair in braids. She had a tough time. She loved that place.
She
didn’t want to leave. You know I was an alcoholic?” I shook my head. “Well, that’s what you’re meant to call it. In the place I went they said it’s a disease. I just liked to drink. That’s not a disease. You like peaches, it’s not a disease.”

“My father’s dead,” I said.

“Some people need their parents. You don’t, you’re okay. Laurie never comes down here. She doesn’t like me much.”

“She talks about you a lot.”

“Big deal. Why doesn’t she come and talk about me down here? She made me sell my house. It was mine, not hers. We should have stayed in Modesto. That show of hers, it’s not going to make her happy. She was better on the radio. She doesn’t have the face for TV. They’re all so skinny.”

“Isn’t that why people like her? She’s different.”

Alma made her humph noise. “You want different, you should put Erica on TV. And she’s skinny enough.” Then she added, “She won’t like you being here.”

Now I felt nervous. “Don’t tell her I came, will you?”

“I’m good at secrets. You got to keep secrets. The Jews next door, they couldn’t keep a secret. I begged them, but they told on him. I said I’d repay them soon as I could.”

“What?”

“The money. Only a couple hundred dollars, but that was a lot then. You know what Los Alamos means in Spanish?”

I was getting lost. “What?”

“Poplars. Trees. Never saw any there, though. My husband—Rudy—stole the money from them. The Jews in the next apartment. Laurie played with their kid. Paully. Mean little boy with
little pig eyes. Paully had seen him in their apartment, then the money was missing. I’ll say that for him, he ’fessed up straightaway. Lost money playing cards. We could have repaid it, but they went all high and mighty. That’s Jews for you. Always better than you. They said we’d betrayed a code of honor. Well, I never signed up for it. Then they said I was drunk, wasn’t fit to look after a child. Okay, I shouldn’t have shouted at them but they shouldn’t have gone to the MPs.”

“The what?”

“Military Police. They kicked us out. The Jews watched us when we left. I could see them smiling. That little Paully. Mean kid.”

“So where did you go?”

“Back to California. He got a job. I don’t know, one of those towns. Never stuck to anything. We moved around. Bakersfield, Fresno. Wasn’t hard to get a job—all the men were overseas fighting. He was four F, something wrong with his feet. He was always lazy. Always playing cards—poker, blackjack, anything he could put a couple of bucks on. We weren’t much by then. Maybe we never were. Laurie cried when we left Los Alamos. Broke my heart.”

It was dark now. The palms at the top of the slope were silhouetted by the lights of the main house. All I could see was Alma’s profile and the light reflecting in her beady little eyes when she tilted her head towards me.

“He was no good, I knew that, but she was crazy about him, Laurie. Snappy dresser, nice looking, too, but you get sick of all that. You wait. We could have gone on, I guess, but then he got that job teaching. Then there was the girl.” She stopped. “Why are you interested in all this?” she said aggressively.

I thought that was a bit unfair. I hadn’t asked her to tell me
anything. She’d wanted to. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s like a jigsaw.”

She humphed. “You got better things to do than jigsaws.”

“Maybe I should go.”

“Go if you want. It’s nothing to me. You’re a strange kid. You don’t say much. What you got to hide?”

“I had a brother who died.”

There was a pause. “That’s tough,” she said. She waited for me to go on.

It took me a moment to get started again. “He was called Jordan. He died a long time before I was born. My parents never talked about him. My mother still doesn’t. Ever. My sister and I don’t know anything about him, just his name. There’s nothing stopping us asking about him, but we don’t.”

She nodded. “Sometimes it’s better not to ask,” she said. “Some things, you better be sure you really want to know.”

“I never knew what happened to him until last night. I met this man, this friend of my parents. He’s pretty ancient. He was confused, his memory’s kind of gone. He thought I was Jordan. He knew Jordan was dead, but he thought for a moment I was him. Like a ghost. Then he was embarrassed. He told me what happened to Jordan. I think I’d built it up in my mind to be something really complicated, but it was simple. They had some nanny, my parents, some au pair, and my mother was late back from somewhere and the nanny was bathing the baby and she left the room for a moment or something and when she came back the baby was dead. The baby had drowned. That was it.”

I was crying now. I was sitting with an old woman and crying at her. She might have been mad, but she was tactful. She didn’t do anything awful like hug me. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to do that.

“Better to know,” she said. “Not always, but you want to know, if it’s your brother. Your parents, hard for them to get over that. You don’t want to fail your children. You want to protect them. I tried to do that for Miss Laurie. Lot of thanks I got for it.”

“I’d better get back.”

“You don’t have to go,” she said.

“It’s late.”

She put out her arm, fragile as a chicken’s wing, to stop me getting up. “This girl,” she said. “This girl. Nine or ten, I guess. In the class he taught. She was ‘slow,’ you called it back then. Sweet-natured. Pretty. Her parents always put flowers in her hair. Nicely dressed, little blond thing. Didn’t look at you when you spoke to her. The parents weren’t too bright either, else they’d have spotted it earlier. He pumped gas in a filling station, the father. Drifters, a lot of them around then. Rudy made her put his thing in her mouth.”

I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to ask her any questions so I stayed silent. She didn’t like it. “You still there? You gone to sleep?”

“No, I was thinking about it.”

“Too much thinking’ll kill you. You watch out. The parents wanted money or else they were going to the police. I knew they wouldn’t, they weren’t the kind of people who went to the police, probably in trouble themselves. Rudy knew that, counted on it, I guess. But I would. He didn’t count on that.” She gave a grim laugh. “I told him if I ever saw him again, the police would be round faster than I could cut his balls off. I had Laurie. She was eight or nine, she loved him. Never had much time for me but she loved him. I gave him the savings we had, not much but enough to get him out of town. Never saw
him again. He might have gone to Oregon. He sent cards from there for a while, but I never gave them to Laurie. Best that way. Then we moved up to Modesto so he didn’t know where we were. I hope he died in jail somewhere.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“What’s to be sorry for? It’s not your doing.”

“You protected her, though.”

She gave another humph. I bent to kiss her good-bye. There was a little tremor in her cheek. She smelled musty and powdery. “I’ll come back again, shall I? When Erica’s not around.”

She shrugged. “You could,” she said. “I don’t mind if you do and I don’t mind if you don’t.” As I left, she was holding her hand to her cheek where I had kissed her.

By the next day I had decided I would do the show. I was feeling bad about a lot of things, about Laurie really, about what Alma had told me, and I wanted to make things as right as I could. What I couldn’t bear was it seeming like Erica had had anything to do with it, because while my position about Laurie and the show had shifted, nothing about Erica had.