Tree of Hands (28 page)

Terence had often tried these methods of combating paranoia, these recognized ways of reassuring oneself by repeating such handy aphorisms as ‘Most of the things you've worried about have never happened' and ‘There is nothing to fear but the fear itself' and ‘They can't eat you' and so on. But they had never helped much, they had never seemed to get through. They were just things you said which sounded good. They didn't probe into the core of fear, still less start the process of breaking it up. There in Finchley High Road, in the grey gloom of a post-Christmas morning, a dreadful wave of depression flowed over Terence as he understood, staring unseeing at a pair of fawn trousers, that he was going to be beset by fear all his life, live in it and be paralysed by it, and there wasn't enough Valium and whisky in the world to keep it at bay. It wasn't worth it, he thought, there was no way it was worth it. But what did he mean by that? What was worth what? Did he mean that life itself wasn't worth the fear it took to live it?

Thinking along those lines wouldn't do at all. He had no alternative now anyway, he'd gone too far. He had signed the contract and committed himself. In for a penny, in for a pound, in for one hundred and thirty-two thousand pounds. He walked into the bank and in a hoarse sentence,
split by a clearing of his throat, asked to see someone about opening an account.

‘Phipps,' he said when they asked his name.

He was told to take a seat and did so in one of the orange leather chairs that stood about. After a minute or two someone came out and said the assistant manager would see him. Terence went into a very small office, also done up in orange, and shook hanks with a man who said his name was Fletcher.

‘I want to open a bank account.' Terence's voice was back to normal though his body felt rather as if he were treading water. ‘With fifty pounds,' he said, aware of what a small sum this sounded these days. It was the utmost he had been able to amass out of three weeks' Social Security.

Fletcher looked, if anything, relieved. It occurred to Terence that perhaps he had thought his visitor was a customer who had wanted an overdraft. ‘That shouldn't present too many problems, Mr Phipps.'

He produced a form which Terence scanned quickly, his throat constricting afresh. There was nothing really to dismay him. A specimen signature was required and, under Fletcher's eye, Terence signed ‘John Howard Phipps' with a hand that desperate concentration made steady.

Then came the bit about furnishing the name and address of a referee.

‘You could apply for a reference,' said Terence, ‘to someone who has an account at your Golders Green branch. Would that be all right?'

‘I should think that would do very well, Mr Phipps.'

So Terence wrote in the space provided, ‘Mr Terence C. Wand', and underneath it, ‘14 Gibbs House, Brownswood Common Lane, London N15', which was his mother's address.

THE GUN WASN'T
the kind of thing Barry had expected. A pistol of some sort, he had speculated vaguely, a revolver, the kind of thing Dennis Gordon must have shot his wife with. This looked more like a rifle someone had messed about with and made a botched job of at that. But the man called Paddy was prepared to take £40 for it and Barry knew that wasn't much for a real gun.

‘You're sure it works?' he said.

‘Sure,' said Paddy.

The room he lived in was one of the nastiest places Barry had ever been into. He hadn't known such places existed in the Hornsey where he had been brought up and where his parents still lived. It had no furniture but a mattress on the floor and an old meat safe with a wire front, and it smelt of unwashed clothes and hamburgers and urine. It was from this meat safe that Paddy had brought the gun.

‘What sort is it?' Barry asked warily.

He wanted to be told one of those famous names familiar to all lovers of violent movies and fiction – Luger, Smith & Wesson, Beretta.

Paddy gave him a sidelong look.

‘It's a sawn-off shotgun, isn't it?' he said.

He was a big burly fair man, not a bit Irish to look at and surnamed Jones. Or so he said. He hadn't much of an Irish accent either, Barry thought. His voice was a zombie drone. But he guessed that Paddy wouldn't have talked to him in the pub or brought him back here or be offering him the gun if he hadn't heard Barry's Irish name and noted in him the black hair and blue eyes and white skin of Connemara.

Barry thought of himself as English – well, British. And sawn-off shotguns he equated with terrorism. But he had to have the gun, he was never going to cross Winterside Down after dark again unarmed. A replica wouldn't satisfy him. His brother had said to get himself one of those replicas, they'd never know the difference, but Barry himself would know, he had thought. Besides, they cost nearly as much as the real thing.

‘I don't suppose we could try it out?'

‘Like where? In here? Down the High Street?'

Barry had thought of Alexandra Park but even that wasn't really big enough for experimenting with guns. When fired it would no doubt make a terrible noise.

‘You have to trust me,' said Paddy.

He suddenly looked – well,
political
was the word. Like one of those Irish National Liberation Army people whose faces were always being shown on the news. Barry took the thin roll of notes out of his jacket pocket. They were practically all he had in the world, nearly all his last week's pay, and it
was
his last week now Ken Thompson had gone bust and been obliged to send him away.

Paddy wrapped the gun in a piece of rag, part of an old grey vest. He put it into Barry's hands as if he were making him a rare and delicate gift.

He said simply, in his dead voice, ‘Kill English.'

That made Barry's blood run cold, those light eyes staring at him and that numb tone and the deadly hate in it. He couldn't get out of the house fast enough but he made himself move nonchalantly until he was beyond Paddy's sight. The last thing he saw of the vendor of weaponry was that chunky puffy face with the unblinking pig eyes watching him over the banisters as he went down all those flights of stairs.

It was too late now to go back to his parents' house. Carol would he home in half an hour. This was the first time he had been out in the evening since coming out of hospital. He had sworn he wouldn't go out until he had the means of protecting himself. Blue Hair and Hoopoe
and Black Beauty had taken a tooth from him and cracked two of his ribs and for a while the doctors thought they had ruptured his spleen. They weren't going to get the chance of that again. He fingered the gun in its grey rag wrapping inside the plastic carrier. It was cumbersome to carry but he would take it with him everywhere he went now. He smiled to himself, thinking how he would fire over their heads and see them run.

The day after he was taken into hospital, the police had come to see him, a sergeant and a constable he hadn't seen before. They asked him if he knew his attackers, and he hesitated for only a second or two before saying no. No, he couldn't identify them, he wouldn't recognize them again, he didn't know their names or where they came from. What was the use of telling? Blue Hair and the rest wouldn't go to jail. They'd be given suspended sentences or sent to psychiatrists and the first thing they'd do was revenge themselves on him.

‘I never saw them,' he said. ‘It was pitch dark. I never had sight nor sound of them till they were on me.'

He could tell from the look on the sergeant's face that he thought what had happened only rough justice. The police couldn't touch Barry, they hadn't the evidence, so where was the harm if a bunch of yobbos gave him the private treatment? A few more questions were put to him but their tone was half-hearted. Maybe the doctors also thought he had killed Jason. And if his spleen really had been ruptured, maybe they'd have let him die and seen it as the best thing.

He and Carol would have to get away, they'd have to move. Perhaps they could get an exchange with a council house in another area. Crouch End, he would like, or Palmer's Green, but no further west than that, nowhere remotely near Hampstead. Wherever they lived it would be as far as possible away from Terence Wand.

Had she seen him while Barry was in hospital? He didn't know and he hadn't asked. In spite of the pain – his body had felt as if on fire and racked with stabbings for days –
Carol's care for him, her shocked horror at his injuries, had brought him a blissful happiness. That first day she came in at visiting time, ran to him and threw herself on to the bed and into his arms with a little hysterical cry. The pressure on his bruised side and arm and thighs had been an intense agony but his joy had outweighed the pain. He hadn't uttered a sound of protest even though she lay on top of him clutching at him with her fingers, and he only whispered to her to get up when the sister was coming and he was embarrassed.

After that first day she hadn't been able to come in all that often. Visiting times were also the times she had to be at work. Naturally he understood that. He had lain there thinking about Terence Wand and wondering if the police had ever done anything about that letter he had sent them. It had been in some ways a silly letter to write. After all, it wasn't of taking away Jason that he suspected Terence Wand, was it?

Maureen came in one evening. He was surprised to see her. She wore her long raincoat and her hair was scraped back in an elastic band. She didn't ask him how he was. His right arm, with the pyjama sleeve rolled up, was lying outside the bedclothes and she lifted it up by the wrist as if it were some inanimate object, a branch, say, or a piece of piping, and examined impassively the by then brown and yellowish bruises.

‘At any rate,' she said, ‘you're still here.'

She meant he wasn't dead.

‘They didn't murder me, if that's what you mean.'

‘Mum says the trouble was he came between you.'

‘Who did?' he said, though he knew. ‘Who came between who?'

‘Jason.'

He looked at her, at the plain round face that was still somehow Carol's face with a broadening here, a flattening there, just sufficient to deny it beauty. The vacant blue eyes met his. What she said took his breath away, a frequent effect of Maureen's utterances.

‘Maybe it's just as well. Maybe it's all to the good. The fact is no one wanted him and he's best out of the way.'

He knew then that she also believed him a murderer. The difference was that she believed but didn't care. She continued to stare at his bruised arm and made as if to pick it up again. He had a creepy feeling that she was capable of taking it by elbow and wrist and snapping the forearm bone in two. Quickly he withdrew it under the sheet and after a while she got up and left, saying as she went, ‘I wouldn't hurry to come out if I was you.'

He had sometimes wondered what that meant. Coming out of hospital, he knew. He was not welcome in the hostile world of Winterside. The revenge taken on him somehow confirmed his guilt. People still spoke to him but no one used his name and their eyes looked at him as if he were different from they, as if the unspeakable thing he was accused of doing set him apart from even the worst of them for ever. That Carol stuck to him, that he still lived in Carol's house, was a wonderful thing, something to be treasured. He was stupidly grateful. Stupidly, he thought now, because he had done nothing, had never laid a finger on Jason, had in fact been one of the few who were really fond of him. They were all wrong in their suspicions and he was right. Even if no one in the world believed in his innocence, he would still be innocent, he still would not have killed Jason. Yet he was learning how hard it is to stand alone, how hard to hold to the truth in isolation, so that one even begins to doubt if it is truth. Several times in hospital and back at home he had dreamed he was in the garden of one of those condemned houses in Rudyard Gardens, burying Jason's body.

Awake, it was a street he always avoided. Getting off the bus, he walked down Delphi Road, past lighted houses, some of which still had Christmas trees and decorations in their windows. Two or three boys in leathers were sitting on the seat outside the public library. The muscles of Barry's stomach tightened, there was a constriction in his throat. He took the gun out of the carrier and put it inside
his zipper jacket. He thought he would slit the pocket lining so that he could keep the gun in there and easily reach for it.

But the boys on the seat were not Blue Hair or Hoopoe or any of them. They were strangers who scarcely looked at him, who hadn't yet learned to know by sight the murderer of Jason Stratford. He made himself enter Winterside Down by the Chinese bridge and the path across the grass, the way he had gone on the night they attacked him. Sooner or later it had to be faced and sooner was best. The gun made a difference.

The night was less dark than that other night and it was much earlier. The grass had a sheen on it in the moonlight and frost painted the tops of the fences phosphorescent. With a leap of the heart he saw that lights were on in Carol's house. Just to make certain he counted the houses as he came across the green to where the footpath ran between the houses, one, two, three, four – yes, eighth from the corner the lights were on.

And the passage between the fences was empty. He walked quickly through, keeping himself from actually running, passing the place where they had knocked him down, wondering if in daylight the stains of his own blood were still there on the concrete and the fence.

He didn't show Carol the gun or even tell her about it. She might have reproached him for spending the money when he was out of work. She was watching television with her feet up, a bottle of red wine from which she had drunk a couple of glasses beside her. He poured himself a glass of wine and sat down next to her. She let him kiss her and her mouth quivered a little under his.