Tree of Hands (12 page)

While he was in there, Karen Isadoro, sent by her mother to buy a large loaf, must have been pushing Jason in the pushchair over the pedestrian crossing in Lordship Avenue towards Rudyard Gardens, towards the only baker's open around there on a Wednesday afternoon. And when Barry had been in there half an hour, Karen had wheeled Jason back again, the loaf in a plastic carrier over the pushchair handles, and in Brownswood Common Lane rung Iris's doorbell in Griffin Villas and found no one at home. Karen had revealed all this later, too many hours later, when with Leatham and the sergeant they had gone round to her school. Barry had known nothing of it at the time, it hadn't cross his mind to think of it while watching
The Dark Crystal
.

By the time the film was halfway through, Karen had encountered her friend Debbie in Lordship Avenue. That Wednesday was the last day of their half-term holiday. Debbie wanted Karen to go round the shops with her and buy a funny card for her mum's birthday. They didn't want Jason. Besides, Karen's mother had said Mrs Knapwell would have him, Mrs Knapwell had promised to take over, she'd got enough on her plate without Carol Stratford's kid day in and day out. They phoned Iris. Or
rather they phoned the lady upstairs at Griffin Villas, a Mrs Love, because Iris hadn't got a phone. Iris was still out.

They took Jason into a newsagent's. At this time, Barry calculated he must have been lighting his fourth cigarette. They took Jason into a sweetshop that also sold cards and he started to cry, wanting sweets, bawling when they said they had no money for sweets. Debbie said she was going to try down Halepike Lane, there was a shop down there that sold funny cards, and she was going
now
. Karen could come if she wanted but she was to get shot of Jason first.

Barry wasn't clear quite what happened next. Who was? Everyone told conflicting stories, saving their own faces, trying to present themselves in the best possible light. Karen said she took Jason out of his pushchair and sat him on a wall in Rudyard Gardens while she went into the phone box there to phone Iris. She took him out of the pushchair because the greengrocer's Dobermann dog was sniffing around and Jason was frightened of the dog which couldn't reach him up on the wall. The trouble was, kids had broken the phone box inside and it didn't work. So she'd left Jason on the wall and run round the corner, just a little way round the corner, and phoned Iris from the call box outside the greengrocer's. She'd only got 10p – well, two 5p pieces – and Mrs Love took so long about the message . . .

Iris had never got it. She'd got a message from Mrs Love, yes. Oh, there was no doubt about that. It was that Karen Isadoro had got Jason. She'd gone up with Mrs Love to talk to Karen on the phone and Karen had gone, the line was making a dialling tone.

‘I left a message,' Karen said to the inspector. ‘I said to the lady upstairs to tell Jason's nan Jason was sitting on the wall in Rudyard and to pop down for him.'

‘Did you really give that message?' said Leatham. ‘You really and honestly told the lady that?'

Karen stuck to it for a moment or two and then she started crying. ‘I meant to,' she mumbled.

‘You meant to, but what did you really do?'

‘I hadn't got no more money and the pips went . . .'

She was only eight. What did they expect? What had
he
expected? Barry hadn't thought much about it. He hadn't thought about it at all sitting in the cinema, watching extraterrestrial reptilian creatures, smoking his sixth cigarette.

Soon after four, the programme was over. Barry got a bus to Muswell Hill and another down the Archway Road. By then it was five to five, so he walked as fast as he could, running part of the way, up the steep hill into Highgate Village and through Pond Square into the Georgian grandeur of the Grove. At the entrance to Fitzroy Park, in the gateway that marks the private road, he waited for Carol. He lit a cigarette. He knew that when she appeared – having turned the bend in the lane which stretched before him, walking towards him between the high hedges, under the overhanging branches of trees – he would experience that movement of the heart and constriction of the throat that was almost a feeling of sickness, though a pleasurable discomfort, that he had each time he went to meet her or saw her coming from a distance or even, coming over the Chinese bridge, saw the lights on in her house. It was new to him, he had never had it before he met her, but he recognized it as a symptom of being in love, just as a man who has never had a heart attack knows the pain in his left arm and the iron grip on his chest for what they are.

He had been there about ten minutes when she showed herself to him at the end of the tunnel of trees. His heart moved, seemed to turn over and then right itself with a small delicate lurch. She saw him and waved. He began to walk towards her. When they met, he put his arms on her shoulders and stood looking at her, her porcelain doll face sullen and rather tired, the gold coin curls clinging to a forehead on which the make-up had clogged and smeared. He took the holdall she carried from her. He didn't like to see her with it. His mother said you could always tell a woman who went out cleaning by her carrier bag with overall and rubber gloves inside.

‘I'm knackered,' Carol said. ‘The Prince of Wales'll be opening. I'm dying for a drink.'

‘Have to make it a quick one then. We've got to fetch Jason. Beatie was a bit funny with me this morning about leaving him there so much.'

Carol always flared. She didn't like criticism. Well, she wasn't alone in that, Barry thought.

‘She can get stuffed. She gets paid for it, doesn't she? And bloody good money too. Anyway you needn't worry about Jason. I phoned Madame Isadoro from Mrs F's and Mum's got him, had him since three, so we can have ourselves a ball, my dear.' She took his arm and snuggled up. ‘Mrs F's off to Tunisia for three weeks and she gave me my money in advance, fifty quid and a bonus for keeping the houseplants watered. How about that?' She produced and waved at him a fifty-pound note, crisp, greenish-gold.

‘I've got money,' Barry said stiffly. ‘I don't want you spending your money.'

‘We had a turn-out of some of her stuff. There was this Zandra Rhodes dress she said I could have. I've got it in that bag. It's something else again, I tell you. Fancy a woman her age thinking she could wear Zandra Rhodes.'

And no doubt Beatie Isadoro genuinely had thought Jason was with Iris, had been safe with Iris since three. Karen thought so too. It wasn't the first time she had left Jason in the street at an appointed place for his grandmother to find him. As for Iris, she had scarcely thought about it at all. Why should she? For all she knew she had been let off the hook for the afternoon. Jason was with Karen, with Karen's family, in the security of the two overcrowded houses, and she had an unexpected free afternoon to unsqueeze her feet out of her high-heeled sandals, get a fag on, watch the TV, wait in peace for Jerry to come home and take her down the Bulldog.

Barry and Carol had a drink in the Prince of Wales and then another and then they went over to the Flask. Carol said Dennis Gordon had said something about this new
club at Camden Lock called the Tenerife, a drinking club with a disco; you just paid a two-pound membership fee at the door, and she wouldn't mind trying it. They had something to eat in a steak house first, and Carol went into the Ladies and changed into the dress which was yellow and red and gold with a short skirt and huge balloon sleeves and a gold sash. She had her red boots on so it looked good, it looked marvellous.

‘You look great,' said Barry. ‘I wish I'd thought to change, I feel a bit of a mess.'

‘You're OK,' Carol said indifferently. With overt narcissism, she gazed into a mirror on the wall of the restaurant at her glittering image.

Barry had suggested they gave the lady upstairs at Iris's a ring and say where they were and they would be late back. He was glad now he'd suggested that, though sorry he hadn't pressed the point. Carol had dissuaded him and dissuaded him easily. He was already anticipating dancing with her, their bodies pressed close among the other hot young bodies, the blue and violet and red lights winking and spotting, the music a hot, throbbing, heavy sound.

If he had got through to Iris, talked to Iris, what good would it have done? Jason was gone by then, gone three hours and more. And Iris would probably have been out anyway, and he would have thought she was doing what he always suspected her of doing but had never probed into too deeply – putting Jason to bed with a drop of whisky in his bottle and leaving him to go down the pub with Jerry.

As it happened, it was nearly two before he and Carol got back. They had to have a taxi. Winterside Down was dead at that hour, though the yellow lamps on their stilts were still on, casting over the straight streets, the U-shaped streets, the single lonely tower and the sluggish strip of canal a phosphorescence that bleached everything to moonscape brown. The taxi wound through the chilly, yellowish-brown, treeless place. They had attempted to grow trees on Winterside Down but somehow they had quickly died
natural deaths or kids had destroyed them. Overhead the sky was a reddish smoky ochre, uniform and starless. There had been a moon when they had been down at Camden Lock but the moon had gone now. Two of the motorbike boys without their machines loitered on the corner of Summerskill and Dalton. Barry wondered if they ever went to bed, sometimes he wondered if they were real. The colours of their plumage were drained by the lamps but he could tell from the shape and stance of them that they were Blue Hair and Hoopoe. They stared at the taxi. Their stillness and their silence, their apparently purposeless biding of time, gave them an air at once threatening and sinister.

Carol had had a lot to drink. She didn't want to wait to get upstairs. In the half-dark, street-lamp-lighted living room, without drawing the curtains she pulled off the Zandra Rhodes dress and her tights and bra. Her body, which was very white, gleamed like marble. She lay on the settee and pulled Barry on to her and into her, her thighs and hips no longer marble-like but soft and moist as cream. There was sweat in pearls on her upper lip. Carol had a way of making little moans alternating with giggles when she made love. Barry held his mouth over hers to stop the rippling, gurgling laughter.

She fell asleep. He had lit cigarettes for them but she was asleep. He picked her up and carried her to bed and then he went down again to fetch the dress and put it on a hanger.

The first time the police really questioned him – the first time they had him down here at the station – they had wanted to know why, next morning, the Thursday morning, Barry hadn't gone straight round to Iris's to fetch Jason. Carol didn't work on Thursday mornings till she started at the wine bar at eleven. Why hadn't he fetched Jason – why, rather, hadn't he
tried
to fetch Jason – from Iris's and taken him home to his mother before he went to work? It was something he had often done in the past. The first time Inspector Leatham asked him, he simply said he
didn't know why, he was late, he left it to Carol. This time, half an hour ago, he had admitted to having had the worst hangover of his life that Thursday morning. With hammering going on in his head, with a dry mouth, hardly able to walk upright, he had staggered downstairs, drunk water out of the cold tap. If he was going to make it to the house in Alaxandra Park where Ken and he were due by nine sharp to start fitting bookshelves, he had to be out of Winterside Down by eight-twenty and out he was, grimly walking with hunched shoulders, his aching eyes screwed up against the cold. The last thing that concerned him was where Jason was or who was going to look after him that day. He didn't think of Jason, he had forgotten him.

Coming home, he remembered. He remembered because, as a matter of course, he called in on Iris or Beatie's to collect him. On Thursdays Carol did a split shift at the wine bar, eleven-till-three and five-till-eleven – long awful hours that Barry hated to think of her having to work.

‘You hadn't seen the boy,' Superintendent Treddick said to him, ‘for what? A day and a night and half a day? You hadn't seen him since about eight on the Wednesday morning?'

‘We knew where he was.' Barry realized what a stupid answer this was as soon as he had made it.

‘That's just what you didn't know.'

Iris lived in the bottom third of a very down-at-heel yellow brick Victorian house. There were three rooms and a kitchen with a bath in it, concealed most of the time by a wooden cover that doubled as a counter. Carol and Maureen had been born and brought up there. There they had been punched and kicked and scarred with belt buckles, and Maureen, who cried a lot, had had her arm broken. Barry had occasionally wondered what Iris had been doing while all this went on. Watching TV probably, smoking, calculating that it couldn't go on for ever and thankful at least that it wasn't her taking the brunt of Knapwell's violence.

It was Jerry who had come to the door.

‘Jason?' he said as if he had never heard the name before, as if it were a foreign name he might not be pronouncing properly.

Iris screeched from inside somewhere: ‘Who's that at the door, Jerry?' She came out, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. ‘Oh, no, Barry, you've made a mistake there. Come to the wrong shop. Those blackies have got him. I haven't had sight nor sound of him since – when was it? – Monday. Don't know ourselves, do we, Jerry, we've been so quiet.'

Before he got to the Isadoros, Barry remembered being up in Highgate the night before and Carol saying she had phoned Beatie and Beatie saying Jason was with Iris. But he went to the double house just the same. Carol could have made that up to keep him quiet. She wasn't untruthful but she wasn't above telling a white lie so as not to spoil his evening. He thought of her fondly, of those small human weaknesses that made her more lovable.