The Tryst (20 page)

The passageway was dark, but a glow up ahead showed that a light was on in the living room. The boy picked his way along the exposed floor joists and odd patches of floorboard that hadn’t gone into the fire. Dave’s ravages had left a gap of almost a yard between a joist at the door and the beginning of the flooring, making it impossible to come into the room gradually. Steve stood there for several minutes, craning his neck and trying to make sense of the faint noises he could hear. It was a mumbling sound, rather like a baby. In the end he took a deep breath and jumped.

On one of the mattresses lay Tracy, the earphones of the Walkman almost lost in her hair. She was wearing a pink skirt over black tights and a white T-shirt printed with a cartoon of a leering orange cat and the words ‘Stick with me, kid – we’ll go places’. A bottle of Drambuie was balanced on her stomach, rising and falling with each breath she took. Her little feet twitched in time to the inaudible music and she was half-singing the words. She waved to Steve and pulled the earphones off.

‘Here, have a listen.’

He knelt down and took the flimsy hoop, still warm from the girl’s head. Tracy raised the bottle of Drambuie to her mouth. A bubble of air slipped between her lips and the glass rim and rose slowly through the dense brown liquid. She held the bottle out to Steve. The boy shook his head.

‘Go on! You got to start sometime.’

He took the bottle and their fingers touched for a moment. He tilted it to his mouth, as she had done. The rim was wet, and when the liqueur trickled down his throat, sweet and hot and perfumed, he imagined that he was tasting her saliva. Her body was terrifyingly close to his. All he had to do was reach out and touch her.

‘Where are the others?’ he asked, handing back the bottle.

‘Out looking for a place to stay. Can’t stop here now, can we?’

Tracy’s was not a successful face, which was one reason why Steve liked it. Some faces were like television; there was nothing to do except sit and look at them. But Tracy’s was a d-i-y face. You needed to spend time on it, but it gave you a great sense of satisfaction and achievement. Without make-up, her features looked as raw, vulnerable and unglamorous to Steve as his own. He had never looked at her from so close before. He knew at once that it would be useless to try to hide anything from her. This came as a great relief.

Tracy pressed a button on the Walkman and music abruptly exploded inside Steve’s head. He watched as she started packing her clothes into crumpled plastic bags. The music made her every gesture seem special and significant, like a film. When the song was over, Steve took the earphones off.

‘When we leaving?’ he asked.

‘Later on. This place’ll be gone tomorrow. Funny, isn’t it?’

Although she was only a few yards away, Steve had the feeling that they were separated by an enormous distance.

‘Can I have a bit more of that stuff?’ he asked, to bring her back.

Tracy turned to him, grinning.

‘Can’t get enough once you get started, can you?’

She came and knelt beside him and they both drank. When Tracy started to get up again, she lost her balance and reached for the boy’s shoulder to steady herself. That pushed him over too, and they fell over together on the mattress. The next moment something wet and warm happened to Steve’s face. By the time he realized that Tracy was kissing him, she had finished. She leaned back, staring up at the ceiling. Her face was still only inches from his, yet this distance seemed even more achingly unbridgeable than the one which had separated them earlier. Miniature music leaked from the earphones abandoned on the mattress beside them, mixed in with the hollow booming of the wind in the chimney. Tracy’s hair had started to grow out from the roots again in its natural mousy colour, as though the spell that had temporarily transformed her into a glamorous witch was slowly wearing off.

‘So anyway, what’s this you’ve been getting up to?’ she asked.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Shopping for some old fucker and that.’

She groped for the bottle and had another swig.

‘Well, he can’t get out of the house,’ Steve explained.

‘What, crippled, is he?’

Steve shook his head, then tapped it with two fingers. ‘Bit mental. He lives in this big house, in this one room downstairs, all full of stuff. But he won’t go outside, see? Thinks somebody’s going to do him.’

‘Fuck.’

Tracy sounded impressed.

‘He won’t even open the door, only to me,’ Steve bragged. ‘I got to ring the bell in a special way, otherwise he won’t come.’

‘How do you mean, special?’

‘Like this.’

He tapped out the rhythm on the floor. Tracy yawned.

‘Sounds a right loony.’

She lay staring up at the ceiling for a while. Then she rolled up and leaned over the boy, flicking her tongue around the whorls of his ear. Steve started and quivered in her grasp, moaning with surprise and pleasure. His throat was dry and his heart pounding. He wished that this had never started, and that it would never end. He twisted round to face her, reached out and placed his hands on her ribs. He could feel the underside of her breasts pressing against the base of his thumbs. This was just as he had imagined it in the stories he used to tell himself: the stotters gone, Tracy come to him, the warmth and the cuddles. Was it possible to make things happen by imagining them, by telling stories about them?

‘So where does he keep it all?’ Tracy asked, putting the earphones back on her head and adjusting the volume. Steve blinked at her.

‘What?’

There was a long pause before she answered.

‘The money he gives you for the shopping and that. If he don’t ever go out, he must have it stashed away somewhere.’

Steve felt it would be a shame to ruin the good impression he seemed to be making by admitting that he didn’t know the answer to this question.

‘It’s in this big trunk upstairs,’ he said, remembering his improved version of the old man’s story.

‘Get out,’ Tracy murmured.

Oddly enough, the fact that Steve knew his story wasn’t true only increased his resentment at not being believed.

‘It is! I’ve been up there! I’ve seen it! There’s this old trunk full of gold and jewels and stuff, in a big room up at the top of the house.’

Tracy said nothing. Her eyes were closed and her body twitched in time to a music only she could hear. Steve assumed that she had already forgotten what they had been talking about. He had grown used to the fact that the stotters’ attention span lasted only a few moments.

‘Where the fuck those wankers got to?’ she remarked at last, turning off the Walkman. ‘We got to get out of here, find somewhere to live! They’ll pull this place down around us if we stay.’

Mistaking this for a joke, Steve laughed. Tracy twisted indignantly out of his grasp and sat up.

‘They fucking
will
!’ she shouted. ‘Bastards, that’s all they are! Fucking bastards.’

Steve felt as though half his body had been torn away. He had lost her. But how could he have guessed that she would still be worrying about things like that after what had just happened? Couldn’t she feel the amazing power generated by their closeness, the energy that set the air between them humming and crackling like high-voltage electricity? This stuff too, he sensed, could light and heat your life, and kill you.

‘Here, what about this old geezer?’ Tracy demanded suddenly. ‘We could stay there! Where’s he live?’

Steve didn’t know what to say. What she was suggesting was unthinkable, of course, out of the question. But how could he explain that?

‘Where’s he live?’ Tracy repeated urgently.

Steve shrugged.

‘Long way off.’

‘Where?’

‘Other side of the main road.’

‘By the Esso?’

‘Other way.’

‘What, by Tesco’s?’

‘You know the park? Round there.’

‘That’s where Debbie lives!’ the girl exclaimed triumphantly. ‘She’d be just round the corner.’

‘Who’s Debbie?’

‘Paxton Grove, that’s where Debbie lives, her and the baby. It’s all council, most of it. Is that it?’

‘Sort of.’

‘What do you mean, sort of? Don’t you even know the name of the street?’

‘It’s on the corner, isn’t it?’ Steve replied with a touch of irritation.

‘Which corner? By the park?’

‘No, the other end. Grafton Avenue. But look, it’s no good. He won’t let us in.’

‘If you ring that special way …’

‘He’s frightened of strangers –’

‘We’re
not
strangers!’ Tracy shouted angrily. ‘We’re friends, aren’t we? Friends of yours.’

Steve fell silent. He just couldn’t get across to her the impossibility of what she was proposing. Tracy had another drink and offered him the bottle, but Steve shook his head, which felt quite muddled enough already. The girl thrust the bottle in his face.

‘Goon!’

It was more a threat than an offer. Steve raised the bottle to his lips, but kept them closed to prevent any of the liquid entering his mouth. Tracy snuggled down beside him, her left hand ruffling his hair. Steve lay there as stiff as a corpse. Something that could only be the girl’s other hand was prowling about on his jeans, smoothing and squeezing the material over his penis.

‘
We
could just go,’ she murmured in his ear. ‘You and me. He wouldn’t be frightened of me, would he? Not of a girl.’

For the first time, Steve began to think that maybe there was some point to what the stotters got up to in the evening. If it felt anything like this, that would explain a lot, even the stories in the lavatory. He had often done it to himself, of course, what Tracy was doing to him, but he’d never realized the difference when someone else did it to you. He wondered what he could do to her in return, to make her feel what he was feeling.

‘What number is it?’

Her voice seemed to come from very far away. Steve had no idea what she was talking about.

‘The house,’ she prompted.

‘Number two.’

He was going on to explain that it wouldn’t work, not even just the two of them, because old Matthews was so far gone that he was quite capable of thinking that Tracy was the devil in drag. But there was no one to explain to, for the girl had taken her hand away, got up and walked out of the room. The floor seemed to be shaking beneath him, as though the wind was making the whole house shudder. It made him feel slightly sick. It was the booze, of course. He was just drunk, fucked up, out of it. He couldn’t understand where Tracy had gone so suddenly, unless she’d had to pee. He lay there, waiting patiently for her to come back.

But she didn’t. Instead, wee Alex appeared in the doorway.

‘Come on,’ he said.

As the epithet that invariably accompanied his name suggested, Alex looked as though he’d been conceived on the cheap. There was a low-budget, no frills air about him which perhaps explained why Steve had never been frightened of Alex in the way he was of Dave or Jimmy. What had happened the week before had made no difference. The boy knew that Alex had just been trying to keep in good with Dave. He would have done the same himself in the circumstances.

‘Where we going?’ he asked as he got to his feet.

‘Ask no questions, you’ll be told no lies,’ Alex recited mechanically.

Steve looked round the room at the mattresses and the plastic bags full of Tracy’s things.

‘Shall I take something?’

Then Dave’s voice, outside the room, roared, ‘Just hurry the fuck up!’

Steve got moving. He had learned the hard way never to make Dave say things twice, because that wound him up. So when they got to the hallway, he was relieved to see that Dave looked quite calm. Tracy was there too, putting on her black and white make-up. Alex pointed to the stairs, wiggling his forefinger back and forth.

‘Upstairs?’ Steve frowned. ‘Why, what’s up there?’

Dave laughed.

‘ “What’s up there?” ’ he mimicked several times.

Each time the question made him laugh afresh. Alex and Tracy joined in the laughter, but Steve sensed that their hearts weren’t in it. They were just trying to keep on the right side of Dave, as usual. This seemed sensible, so Steve laughed as well.

‘What’s so funny?’ Dave demanded aggressively. There was no trace of humour in his voice or on his face. Alex punched Steve on the shoulder. The boy felt totally confused. It was as if they had all changed parts: Tracy had treated him like one of the stotters, while Alex was coming on tough like Dave. Steve couldn’t think who Dave was acting like, but certainly not himself.

‘Get the fuck upstairs!’ Alex told him.

This was easier said than done. The lower flight had been so extensively quarried for firewood that nothing remained but the framework, like a ladder without rungs. Steve and Alex clambered up, followed more slowly by Dave. When they reached the landing, Alex pushed Steve forward into one of the two bedrooms at the rear of the property. There was no electricity upstairs, but a faint glimmer from the next street showed an extent of bare boards and peeling wallpaper. Dave inspected the lock with a look of disgust that reminded Steve of Jimmy. Was that whose part Dave had taken? But then where did that leave Jimmy?

‘Might have known it,’ he complained. ‘No fucking key.’

Alex gave the lock a brief glance.

‘If I had another of them hangers …’

He nodded at the cupboard built into one corner of the room.

‘What’s the matter?’ Dave sneered. ‘You scared?’

He walked over to the cupboard and disappeared inside. A moment later he reappeared holding a wire clothes-hanger. Alex straightened out the loop at the top, stuck it into the lock and twiddled it back and forth, bending it against the edge of the keyhole. The bolt emerged with a sharp click.

‘Fucking brilliant,’ said Dave.

He and Alex turned to go out. Steve made to go with them, but Dave pushed him back.

‘Where you think you’re going?’

‘Thus far and no further,’ Alex supplied.

Steve looked from one of them to the other in bewilderment.

‘But those men, they’ll be back in the morning! They’ll find me here! I’ll get into trouble!’