The Missing World (5 page)

Without warning the door swung wide and a voice streamed out. “Mr. Adams, I am so sorry. Inexcusable, really, especially in this sodding weather. I was doing the eyelashes. The glue dries in ninety seconds. Do, please, come in.”

In the doorway stood the most immaculately bald man Freddie had ever seen. His entire head was a beautiful, shapely, shining pink. Freddie stared, knowing he was staring, until Mr. Early motioned him inside. “Upstairs, upstairs,” he urged, and Freddie climbed.

On the first landing he stepped into an amazing room. Everywhere, in serried ranks along the walls, were heads and their components: trays of eyes, piles of wigs and hairpieces, drawings of lips, sets of eyelashes and ears. And as Freddie stood there, taking in these proto-humans and feeling taken in by them, Mr. Early came up beside him. “May I get you something? Tea? Coffee? Horlicks?”

“What are these? I mean, what are they for?”

“Shops, films, telly, the police, whoever needs a head. I should apologise for the overwhelmingly Caucasian nature of my work.”

At the word “Caucasian,” Freddie turned to look at Mr. Early and found his gaze met by a pair of mild blue eyes behind dainty circular glasses. Mr. Early was looking at Freddie as if he saw not the external thing that most people got caught up with—a six-foot-two black American, arguably good-looking, possibly threatening—but the secret, complicated, surprising
homunculus that Freddie considered his true self. “Coffee, please,” he said.

As Mr. Early padded away, Freddie wandered across the room and sat down at the long worktable. His arms were trembling; beneath his clothes tiny hands were brushing the skin. He recognised the old feeling, deeply buried, dormant for nearly two years, undiminished; and beyond the feeling, a fact that neither time nor words could alter. The hands were all it took to thrust him out of his state of quasi-contentment with his job, with London, with himself. They were what had driven him to skip his graduation at Stanford, to quit four jobs in Silicon Valley, to flee Cincinnati first for Paris and then south to Lourdes, where he’d worked, if that was the word, as a stretcher bearer, an occupation that made everything else tolerable until it, too, became intolerable.

Here in London, before becoming a roofer, he’d had a perfectly decent job as a locksmith, part-time, okay money. One day he’d had a call from the council: a social worker needing entry to a basement flat in Dalston. As he dismantled the old-fashioned lock, a faint mewling came from behind the door. “Perhaps they have a dog,” the social worker said hopefully.

“Perhaps,” said Freddie.

Finally the lock yielded, but not the door. Something lay against it. “Push gently,” said the social worker, and Freddie did.

He quit the next day. The hands were everywhere. After lying on the couch for three weeks, until there was nothing left to eat in his apartment save a bag of rice, he phoned Trevor, a friend of a friend, and asked if he could apprentice himself as a roofer.

“An apprentice,” said Trevor. “Crikey. I’ve never had one before, but I don’t see why not.”

In person Trevor turned out to be a bouncy, talkative man, wearing the cleanest hightops Freddie had ever seen outside a shop. “Oh, you’re black,” he said when Freddie appeared at the foot of his ladder. “That’s nice.” Freddie could only agree.

At thirty-seven, Trevor still shared a house with his mother in Stoke Newington. Freddie, invited for tea, found the two of them awash in antimacassars and aspidistras, not to mention three Scotties, one pregnant. They questioned him about America—was it true you could get married at twelve, buy a gun at thirteen?—and made him point out his hometown in the atlas. The huge distance between London and Cincinnati had prompted Trevor’s mother to give him Agnes. “Your family are so far away,” she said.

For six months Freddie followed Trevor around, carrying ladders, passing tools, learning how to diagnose problems and fix them. Then he’d phoned home to ask for a loan. “Oh, Freddie,” said his mother, “not again. Talk to your dad.” And there was his eighty-year-old father growling into the phone that he wasn’t made of money. “All I need is five thousand,” Freddie protested, “for a ladder, tools, and a van.” “Why would anyone hire you to fix their roof?” his father said. Freddie explained that the roofs in London were trash, fixing them was easy, and he was good at it. “People trust me because I’m tall,” he said. “Not me,” his father said, and hung up. Ten days later the cheque had arrived, accompanied by a form promising repayment, at prime interest, within two years. Freddie still had it in a drawer somewhere, along with Agnes’s pedigree.

Mr. Early returned carrying a tray. “Milk? Sugar? Help yourself.” He followed his own advice and took the wicker armchair beside the tiled fireplace.

Maybe, thought Freddie, taking the opposite chair, if he just kept moving, chatting, he could stay ahead of the devils this time. “Nice stuff,” he said, holding up his cup. “Pooleware?

Most people keep a chipped mug for the roofer. Did you fix the eyelashes?”

“Sufficiently. It is amazing how much one can do in ninety seconds. How do you know about Pooleware?”

“When I first came here, I helped out at an antique store. I once saw a William Morris tea set in somebody’s kitchen. Old guy, dead wife, didn’t have a clue.”

“And?” said Mr. Early, tweaking the knees of his trousers.

“I suggested a trade: the repairs on his roof for the set. He agreed, then changed his mind. Said Mildred wouldn’t like it and gave me a rubber cheque. Let’s hope he finally made a killing.”

Mr. Early was nodding. Behind him a row of heads, some with features, some without, mirrored his gleaming pinkness, pate after pate. “One of those sad cases when virtue must serve as its own reward. I expect Oscar has some trenchant remark about that.” He waved an airy hand as if this Oscar might be lurking among the heads. “Do you like taking risks?”

Oh, Wilde, thought Freddie, glad he hadn’t asked. “No way. I’m a cautious, cross-at-the-crosswalk kind of guy.”

“Me too, in most respects. I read a book,
The Day Before Yesterday
. Maybe you’ve heard of it? The author claims that every twenty-three million years, roughly speaking, the earth is hit by a meteor so large it changes the entire climate. Everything. That’s what happened to the dinosaurs. They weren’t stupid. In fact, as a species they were quite highly evolved. Then this meteor showed up and …” He shrugged.

“Curtains?” Freddie offered.

“Curtains,” Mr. Early agreed gravely. “I found it quite helpful: fear of meteors. For a while all my other worries seemed irrelevant.” He raised his cup, lowered it untasted. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-four—no, thirty-five,” said Freddie, struggling to
recall both his birthdate and the last time someone who didn’t want to get him horizontal had asked about it. Was this guy a fag? He checked out his host’s neatly crossed ankles, his black trousers and dark green cardigan. Could be.

“I would have guessed late twenties.” Again the blue eyes regarded Freddie. “I don’t mean appearance.”

“About your roof,” Freddie said.

They put down their cups and Mr. Early led him up another flight of stairs to a back room the colour of honey, a room so restful that Freddie had to fight the temptation to sit down again, and pointed to a stain the size of a frying pan. “I thought,” Freddie said, “you were practically using an umbrella in the house.”

“Forgive me.” Mr. Early spread his hands. “Exaggeration in the face of emergency. I was worried you wouldn’t come if I said a small leak was driving me mad. Do you need something to stand on?”

Freddie didn’t. In this attic room he could touch the ceiling without even stretching. The plaster was damp but still firm. He opened the window. Happily there was a paved patio.

He went on automatic pilot, carrying the ladder around, setting it up, thinking all the while about the room of heads. He pulled on his gloves and started to climb. Just past the first floor, something happened. The ladder began to dip and sway, as it always did around this height, but suddenly Freddie was afraid. A few feet in front of him the dingy bricks of the house blurred; the mossy pointing vanished. He stopped and clung to the next rung. Something was falling out of the sky. Something was smashing him down to earth.

Then, from the same window where he had reconnoitred, Mr. Early’s shining head appeared. “You know it’s a beastly day for this. Are you sure you’re all right?”

Though the ladder still swayed like a willow, the bricks
grew solid and the sky, while grey and lowering, was again empty. “Cool,” Freddie said firmly.

He continued climbing and was delighted to find two broken slates in the gutter. These were the easy jobs: the problem inside matched by a clear cause outside. Often enough he mounted the ladder to be met with row upon row of smug slates. The water was getting in somewhere and trickling down until it came to a weakness in the plaster. Lucky he’d never had to work on thatch.

Back inside, he couldn’t help noticing a letter on the hall table addressed to Donald Early, Esquire—unopened, in spite of the month-old London postmark. So Mr. Early too, thought Freddie, has his dark corners.

In the upstairs room he was bent over the head, steadily punching in copper-coloured strands of hair. “I’d forgotten,” he said, “that I don’t like people on ladders. I always imagine them falling and feel guilty.”

“Yes, well, you’ve got two broken slates.” Freddie gave his standard warning about how once the nails started to go, it was downhill until the whole roof was redone. “I only guarantee the work I do, and that’s void if you let anyone else up there.”

“Stern words. What’s the damage?”

“Forty-seven pounds.”

Mr. Early reached for another lock of hair. “How did you arrive at such an odd sum, Mr. Adams?”

Freddie was used to having his estimates queried, but not with such calm curiosity. “Call me Freddie. Three pounds fifty for each slate and forty for labour.”

“And when might this labour occur?”

“The day after tomorrow, if the weather holds. Around three?”

“Good, you’ll be able to admire Bethany.”

“Bethany?”

Mr. Early waggled the head.

So it was settled, and now, pedalling around the drab expanse of Highbury Fields, Freddie asked himself, What the heck am I going to do? A speed bump appeared in front of him. Slowing, he caught sight of a street sign. The name rang a distant bell. Did he know someone who lived here, or someone he’d worked for? Then it came to him, the message on his answering machine a few days ago. The caller, Littleman, Littleton, had been unusually precise, a back extension of Welsh slate, possible party-wall problems; he was sure to be a pain to work for. If I
can
work, Freddie thought. The couch beckoned.

He stopped, straddling the bike, to scan the street. No way to tell which house contained his potential customer. In the darkness, except for a couple of sagging ridge-poles, the roofs were all perfect. Glancing from chimney to chimney, he remembered his fit on the ladder. Stuff like that came and went, but could he have had an attack of vertigo? He started pedalling again. If only, he thought, slipping into second gear. What he wouldn’t give for a decent, ordinary phobia.

They had been waiting for so long for Hazel to regain consciousness, through so many tests and drugs and consultations, that without anyone precisely saying so, Jonathan had become convinced this was the key to recovery. Once she was conscious, the seizures would stop. So the day after she opened her eyes, when he felt her hand tremble, his first thought was that she was moved by his reading; he had reached the chapter on swarming. Two summers ago, he and Hazel had followed the inhabitants of one of his hives down the street and across the railway line only to watch the small, dense cloud settle impossibly high in a horse chestnut tree. “Do you remember,” he said, “when my bees swarmed?”

The muscles in her neck grew taut, her eyes rolled back, a gurgling sound came from between her lips.

“Hazel,” he said urgently. “I’m here. Are you all right?”

And then all he could think about was one of those horror films where something lunges from the depths of a lake to drag its prey beneath the surface. Hazel vanished and he was left clutching the hand of this struggling body. The IV lines swung back and forth. “Call the nurse,” he shouted. “Hazel, Hazel, stay still.”

But already she was far away, the nurse holding her arm and calling for more help. Jonathan stood back, trying not to watch. Even his presence could not save her.

After Hazel was wheeled away to the ICU, Nora suggested an early night. As usual George demurred; the two of them should leave, he would wait. But Jonathan added his voice to Nora’s. Waiting helped no one, especially Hazel. What they needed was a decent meal and a good night’s sleep. “You can always phone,” he added. Out in the street, worried they might ask him to join them for supper, he bade a hasty good night and strode off towards the bus stop. The orderly chaos of the hospital had left him starved, greedy. He buttoned his coat against the wind and drew in deep breaths of bad London air.

He and Hazel had woken to a wind like this their first New Year together. I know what we should do, Hazel said. Walk the Pilgrims’ Way. They drove south across the empty city and in less than an hour were tramping along a muddy lane, struggling to recall the opening lines of Chaucer. Presently signs led them to Coldrum Barrow; a beech tree hung with ribbons and garlands marked the entrance. For the solstice, Hazel said. Side by side, caught in the absolute oldness of the place, they watched the ribbons dancing in the wind, the standing stones circling the grave. How many journeys had begun or ended
here, thought Jonathan. He took off his scarf and tied it to the tree.

Perhaps this memory, or perhaps a sudden influx of teenagers on the bus, made him get off two stops early and head for Steve and Diane’s. By the time he turned into Jackson Road, he was half hoping they would be out, but Katie, their two-year-old, kept them close to home, and as usual the lights were on. Now that he was here, it seemed stupid not to say hello.