Portobello (21 page)

'Out,' said Lance, his mouth drying and his throat constricting.

'Pardon? Would you repeat that?'

'I was out.'

'Out where?'

'I was walking around.' He said it slowly and carefully.

'Around where?' said the detective sergeant.

Lance said he couldn't remember. He'd been into a pub. When
they asked which pub he said he couldn't remember that either.
Pressed to remember, he said he thought it might have been in
Westbourne Park Road. He still couldn't guess what they were
getting at and the most important thing to him was to keep them
from finding out that he'd been breaking into a house in Pembridge
Villas. Suppose they searched his nan's place and found that
jewellery? Any minute now he expected them to say they'd like to
search, they'd get a warrant and all that stuff you heard on the
telly. But they didn't. They asked him why he had said Uncle Gib's
house wanted destroying.

'It's a shithole, innit?' he said. 'It's a tip.'

'So you did say it? You wanted to destroy it?'

'I never said that.' Lance was getting seriously alarmed.

'Maybe you didn't say you resented Mr Lupescu having the top
flat.'

'Well, it wasn't fair, was it? Him coming over here from some
foreign place and getting the best bit of the house.'

His nan was looking more and more uneasy. 'I don't reckon you
want to say any more off your own bat, Lance.' An inveterate viewer
of
The Bill
and
Kavanagh QC
, 'You want to ask for a lawyer,' she
said.

'Good idea,' said the detective sergeant nastily. 'He can do that
when we get him down the station. Which is like now.'

Lance was so relieved that they didn't mention the old woman
in Pembridge Villas or ask his nan to show them the package of
jewellery, which he had been convinced they must suspect her of
having, that he settled quite happily into the back of the car in
which he was driven to Notting Hill police station. The lawyer
they found for him was a very nice young lady who didn't look old
enough to be a qualified solicitor.

The questioning began again. It went on for hours and Lance
expected to hear those fateful words, so often light-heartedly
listened to on TV, about anything he said being repeated in court.
But in the middle of the night they released him on police bail.

Keeping an eye on Elizabeth Cherry's house, Susan Cox let
herself in on Thursday morning and went dutifully from
room to room. But her mind wasn't on what she was doing.
She was thinking about the Notting Hill Carnival, due to begin
on the coming Saturday and continue until the Monday evening.
Its route this year was down Great Western Road from Westbourne
Park Station, along Westbourne Grove and up Ladbroke Grove, a
U-shape which would take in the Portobello Road but not enter
it. The nearest it would pass to Pembridge Villas was when it sang
and danced and rocked and rapped down Chepstow Road, but
stragglers from it often strayed into these quiet sequestered streets
and Susan feared for the small pieces of statuary in her front garden
and the flowers in Elizabeth's. At one previous carnival a dancer
in white satin with feathered angel's wings and a man dressed like
Captain Hook had picked all the dahlias, and sat on the wall and
rapped some lines of a current hit. Susan felt it incumbent upon
her to stop that happening again, especially while Elizabeth was
away.

It was a cool, pale-grey day, dry and windless. Because there
was no wind and the curtains hung straight in their regular pleats,
she failed to see that there was no glass in one of the dining-room
windows. Lance had been an apt pupil of Dwayne's and had cut
cleanly. She saw the buddleia and bamboo in Elizabeth's garden,
as she always did, without noticing the lack of an intervening pane.
The kitchen seemed just as she had found it two days before apart
from an odour of not very fresh tomato. It was unlike Elizabeth to
have thrown into the bin a soup can without first rinsing it but
perhaps she had been in a hurry. After more than a week it would,
of course, smell unpleasant. Wrinkling her nose, Susan removed
it, still inside its bin liner, and took it home with her to be washed
and put conscientiously in the recycling.

Making his preparations for the end, Joel now lived in as near
to total darkness as is possible in a flat in the middle of
London. No longer did light come through the glass pane in his
front door. He had covered it up with a sheet of cardboard fixed
to the frame with drawing pins. But there were lamps outside in
the street that never went out. After the wettest, dullest, cloudiest
summer since records began, the sun had begun to shine by
day and the moon by night. Absolute darkness was impossible.
Besides, his eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. Like a cat,
he could find his way from room to room almost as easily as if the
place had been brightly lit.

Noreen too had grown used to the way he lived. She came only
three nights a week now and, to please him, brought with her a
padded draught excluder in the shape of a snake, green and yellow
with a forked tongue, which she laid along the bottom of her
bedroom door. As well as draughts, it excluded the light from her
bedside lamp. Linda no longer came. He couldn't understand why
she was afraid of him and his home but she was. He had said
nothing about her absence to Ella or his mother or Miss Crane.
As for his father, no doubt he paid the bills without noticing or
caring.

He had accumulated a quantity of sleeping pills. The hospital
dispensary had provided him with a supply, some of which he had
never taken. Linda had told him she needed pills if she was to get
any sleep under his roof and on her last visit she had been so
nervous that she had left hers behind. When she came round for
them next day he said he knew nothing about her Mogadon and that
she had to accept. The best sleeping pills, the strongest and most
numerous, came from his mother. Her doctor gave her as many sedatives
as she wanted and she had just asked for double her usual
prescription on the grounds that worry about her son kept her
awake. Joel investigated her handbag under cover of the habitual
darkness and added these to his cache.

Noreen shopped for him on her way to Ludlow Mansions. The
list he gave her always included meat and eggs and ready meals,
and sometimes a bottle of wine. She wasn't surprised when he
added gin and whisky to the list and she took it as a sign he was
getting better. Cunningly, he wrote down mixed nuts as well and
rice crackers. Starting to enjoy life, she told herself. Inviting friends
round. Soon he'd be switching on lights and pulling up the blinds.

But he wasn't enjoying life. Nor was he doing or planning to do
what Ella or Miss Crane might have suspected had they known
about the pills and the spirits. Ella hadn't come lately. His fault.
He could have called her, sent for her, but that he was postponing
until the right time came, the absolutely precise right time. He
had given up walking. Miss Crane he continued to visit once a
week, wearing sunglasses, going to her consulting room in a taxi
and returning home in one. He talked to her about Mithras, making
up most of what he said, quite enjoying his inventions. Perhaps
the psychotherapist knew this but if she did she gave no sign.

'He's started telling me to kill people with red hair,' he said. Miss
Crane had red hair. 'When demons are incarnated their hair turns
red.' She made no answer, not even nodding. 'I don't want to obey
him because then he'll know he controls me.'

Mithras – the real Mithras – was visible more often to him now.
In every beam of light that managed to infiltrate its way into the
flat, he saw him. He told Miss Crane he never saw Mithras, only
heard his voice. He told her Mithras said Ella and his mother and
Noreen were demons, and he would have to kill them if he wanted
peace of mind and happiness. They weren't red-headed but they
were women and that was enough. Miss Crane said nothing.
A thin, birdlike woman, her hair a mass of tight curls, she sat quite
still, sometimes writing words on a sheet of paper. Joel only said
those things because he had read that this is how schizophrenics
behave. They hear voices and the voices tell them to commit crimes.
It would be quite interesting to act the part of a schizophrenic,
like a kind of hobby. Joel had never had a hobby of any sort. All
Miss Crane said was that he should continue with his medication
and she'd see him next week. On his way home, his hood up and
wearing his strongest sunglasses, Joel went into a bookshop and bought
a book about schizophrenia.

Noreen admitted a brief flood of light when she let herself out
in the morning. Even after she had closed the door behind her, he
saw Mithras across the hall. He had grown very beautiful, like the
Michelangelo statue of David he had once seen in Florence and
many times since in pictures. But now Joel longed to be rid of
him. Later in the day Mithras talked, never telling Joel to harm
people, but speaking mostly about the place he came from, that
glorious city where angels walked on the glowing battlements.
Sometimes he said he wanted to be back there, in that light, that
sunshine which shone on the walls and roofs and minarets. He
wanted to be back there but he didn't know how to find his way.

'I will find you a way,' Joel said to him. 'I know how to get you
there and I'll do it soon.'

When he made this promise, and he was starting to make it
every day, Mithras was silent and Joel knew he was grateful. Once
he had been wary of addressing Mithras in Noreen's presence but
now he spoke to him loudly in front of her so that she would think
him schizophrenic.

Lance appeared in the magistrates' court and was once more
released on police bail. Not many years before, in Uncle Gib's
day for instance, they would have remanded him in custody. But
there was no vacant cell in the police station and no room in the
prisons, so Lance came home and made his way to his parents'
flat in Acton, for he knew the well-tried dictum that home is all
that is left for you to go to and where they have to take you in.

They weren't pleased. Another rule in these homecomings is
that Dad is hard-hearted and will do his best to show you the door
while Mum remembers how she carried you for nine months and
what a lovely baby you were, only son et cetera, and dissuades
him. They had a spare room, which had once been Lance's room
and was now full of defunct kitchen equipment, old motorcycling
magazines, a broken bicycle and a stack of car tyres of unknown
provenance. But a space was cleared for Lance to sleep there.

More than anything, he missed Gemma. He lay awake in that
horrible bedroom trying to think of ways to reach her. Traffic thundered
past the block where his parents lived. There was a pothole
in the roadway just outside and every time a heavy lorry passed
over it the place shook as if an earthquake were happening, and
Lance was afraid the broken bike and the stacked tyres would
topple over on top of him. One of the neighbours had written to
the council that it was time they mended the road but nothing
was done. He tried to phone Gemma when he calculated Fize
would be at work but he never got a reply.

The police were determined to victimise him. The 'perpetrator'
they called him, a word Lance hadn't previously heard. 'Alleged'
was another word he didn't understand. Of course he could have
told them he couldn't have set fire to Uncle Gib's house because
he was breaking into Elizabeth Cherry's at the time but he dismissed
that solution out of hand. The chances were they'd never be able
to prove arson, and therefore murder, and he'd get off scot-free
while being found guilty of burglary, which would land him in
prison. Uncle Gib always used to say that the British never cared
much about what you did to other people, it was property they
thought more of. Lance hadn't taken much notice at the time but
those words came back to him while he was in a police cell and
now in his parents' flat.

Lying in his uncomfortable bed at night, shaken and buffeted
by the lorries going past, he thought of Gemma and he repeated
that word 'perpetrator' to himself, trying to decide whether it
sounded worse than 'burglar' or better.

The Notting Hill Carnival starts on Saturday but Sunday and
Monday (a Bank Holiday) are always the big days. Its route
this year, much the same as last year, eventually wound its way up
Ladbroke Road and it was there that Uncle Gib stationed himself.
In years gone by, when he hadn't been inside, he regularly attended
the Notting Hill Carnival and he didn't see why he should miss
this year just because his house had burnt down. He was a thief,
or rather had been a thief, so he knew that pickpockets and bag
snatchers infested the Carnival route, mingling with the crowd.
For this reason he took no money with him. If he had possessed
credit cards, a watch and jewellery, he wouldn't have taken those
things with him either. He was unaccommodated man but for his
second-hand trousers bought off a stall in the Portobello Road and
one of Reuben's collarless shirts. If anyone had stolen from his
person he would, as a former thief himself, have been deeply
ashamed, so he gave them no opportunity.

Among the crowds watching the floats, the bands and the
dancers, the blazing colours under a freak sunny sky, he spotted
first Lance and later Fize with a black guy and a white one. To
some extent Uncle Gib had what the average person (but not
psychiatrists) call a split personality. A born-again religious man,
he of course deplored stealing as in direct defiance of a
Commandment but, as a reformed thief, he watched with enjoyment
the antics of such as Ian Pollitt, the black one and the white
one as they sized up the hundreds who lined the route and calculated
which pocket or handbag might be rifled with impunity. He
actually saw the white one remove what looked like a credit card
from a woman's jacket pocket and Pollitt attempt, but fail, to extract
a purse from a handbag.

Distracted by all this as he was, Lance caught him off-guard.
There was no escape. Uncle Gib rounded on him before he could
speak. 'If I wasn't against bad language like I am, I wouldn't call
you an arsonist but an arse
hole
.'

'I haven't done nothing,' said Lance.

'Why aren't you banged up? That's what I want to know.'

'I don't know. They never said. I'm on bail. Can I come and live
at your place?'

Uncle Gib almost spat. 'I haven't got a place. I'm homeless.
Some dear friends took me in out of the goodness of their hearts
and there's no room for the likes of you.'

Next day came Dorian Lupescu's funeral, a grand extravagant
affair at the Russian Orthodox church in Moscow Road. Uncle
Gib was invited. How Dorian's parents and wife and aunts and
uncles and cousins knew of his existence and where to find him
Uncle Gib didn't know, but they did find him and sent an invitation
on beautiful cream-laid paper with a black border and a black
silk ribbon bow. His striped suit having perished in the fire, he
borrowed one from Reuben along with another shirt and black tie.
Poor Dorian's body was transported in a mahogany coffin with brass
fittings in a black-and-gold carriage drawn by four black horses
with black feathers on their heads. The service was in Russian or
Greek or something but Uncle Gib sang along with the hymns in
English, though he didn't really know the tunes.

Afterwards, they all stood out in the street smoking strong Russian
cigarettes and Dorian's mother thanked Uncle Gib in the best
English she could manage for being kind to her son and Gib was
so moved that he had tears in his eyes for the first time since he
was an infant. Back at home with the Perkinses a piece of good
news awaited him. The Children of Zebulun had clubbed together
and bought him a new computer. Maybelle was giving him the box
room for a study to use for answering his Agony Uncle letters.

August went out like a lion, a very wet and bedraggled lion,
and September came in like a lamb, skipping in the sunshine.
At the beginning of the first week, in the middle of the afternoon,
Elizabeth Cherry came back from her holiday. Almost the first thing
she noticed was the glassless window frame. Rain had soaked the
curtains, which had dried again with unsightly stains, and left a
damp patch on the carpet. She phoned Susan, who knew nothing
about it and who began abject apologies for not noticing. You can't
castigate your neighbour who has been keeping an eye on your
property without payment even though that eye has failed to spot
the only thing it was kept there for. Would Elizabeth like Susan
to come over? Elizabeth said not now, tomorrow perhaps, and
carried her case upstairs. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed.
She unpacked her clothes and tipped the contents of the small
jewel case she had carried with her – a spare watch in case the
battery in hers gave out and a ring to wear for a dress-up evening
– into the large jewel box on her dressing table.