The Four Last Things Page 6

  Gardening was not among Stanley’s hobbies and in his lifetime the back garden remained a rank and overgrown place, particularly at the far end, where an accidental plantation of elder, ash and buddleia had seeded itself many years before. Over the tops of the trees could be seen the upper storeys of a block of council flats, which Thelma said lowered the tone of the neighbourhood. At night the lighted windows of the flats reminded Eddie of the superstructure of a liner. He liked to imagine it forging its way across a dark ocean while the passengers ate, drank and danced.

  As a child, Eddie had associated the tangle of trees with the sound of distant trains, changing in direction as the wind veered from Gospel Oak and Primrose Hill to Kentish Town and Camden Road. He heard their strange, half-animal noises more clearly than in the house or even in the street – the throbbing of metal on metal, the rush of air and sometimes a scream. When he was very young indeed, he half-convinced himself that the noises were made not by trains, but by dinosaurs who lay in wait for him among the trees or in the patch of wasteland on the other side of the fence.

  Though Stanley had no time for gardening, he liked to stand outside on a summer evening while he smoked a cigarette. His head cocked, as if listening carefully to the rumble of the trains, he would gaze in the direction of the trees and sometimes his pale, sad face would look almost happy.

  In those days, the late 1960s and early 1970s, Rosington Road was full of children. Most of the houses had been occupied by families, whereas nowadays many of them had been cut up into flats for single people and couples. There had been fewer cars, children played in the street as well as in the gardens, and everyone had known one another. Some of the houses had belonged to the same families since the street was built in the 1890s.

  According to Thelma, the house had been Stanley’s choice. She would have preferred somewhere more modern in a nice leafy suburb with no blacks or council housing. But her husband felt that his leisure was too important to be frittered away on unnecessary travel and wanted to live closer to the City and the head office of the Paladin. The house was semi-detached, built of smoke-stained London brick, two storeys above a basement. The ground sloped down at the back, so the rear elevation was higher than the front. The other older houses in the road were also semi-detached, though the gaps between each pair and its neighbours were tiny. During the war the area had suffered from bomb damage. One bomb had fallen on the far end of the road and afterwards the council had cleared the ruins to make way for garages and an access road for blocks of flats, newly built homes for heroes, between Rosington Road and the railway line.

  Adult visitors rarely came to the house. ‘I can’t abide having people here,’ said Thelma. ‘They make too much mess.’

  When his mother went out, she would hurry along Rosington Road with her head averted from the windows, and her eyes trained on the kerb. When Eddie was young she would drag him along in her wake, her fingers digging into his arm. ‘We must get on,’ she would say with an edge of panic to her voice when he complained of a stitch. ‘There’s so much to do.’

  Stanley was very different. As he was leaving home he picked up another persona along with his umbrella, hat and briefcase. He became sociable, even gregarious, as he strolled along Rosington Road on his way to the station. Given a choice, he walked slowly, his chest thrust out, his feet at right angles to each other, which gave his gait more than a suspicion of a waddle. As he progressed down the street, his white, round face turned from side to side, searching for people – for anyone, neighbour or stranger, adult or child.

  “Morning. Lovely day. Looks like it’s going to last.’ He would beam even if it was raining, when his opening gambit was usually, ‘Well, at least this weather will be good for the garden.’

  At the office Stanley had a reputation for philanthropy. For many years he was secretary to the Paladin Dependants Committee, an organization which provided small luxuries for the widows and children of former employees of the company. It was he who organized the annual outing to Clacton-on-Sea, and the week’s camping holiday, also once a year, which involved him taking a party of children for what he called ‘a spot of fresh air under canvas’.

  Eddie never went on these outings. ‘You wouldn’t enjoy it,’ Thelma told him when he asked to go. ‘Some of the children come from very unfortunate backgrounds. Last year there was a case of nits. Do you know what they are? Head lice. Quite disgusting.’ As for his mother, Eddie found it impossible to imagine her in a tent. The very idea was essentially surreal, a yoking of incongruities like a goat in a sundress – or indeed like the marriage of Stanley and Thelma Grace.

  His parents shared a bedroom but to all intents and purposes there might have been a glass wall between them. Then why had they stayed together at night? There was a perfectly good spare bedroom. Thelma and Stanley must have impinged on each other in a dozen different ways: her snoring, his trips to the lavatory; her habit of reading into the early hours, his rising at six o’clock and treading ponderously across the room in search of his clothes and the contents of his pockets.

  Loneliness? Was that the reason? It seemed such an inadequate answer to such a complicated question.

  As it happened, Stanley enjoyed his own company. He spent much of his time in the basement.

  The stairs from the hall came down to a large room, originally the kitchen, at the back of the house. Two doors opened from it – one to the former coal cellar, and the other to a dank scullery with a quarry-tiled floor. Because of the lie of the land, the scullery and coal cellar were below ground level at the front of the house. A third door had once given access to the back garden, but Stanley screwed this to its frame in the interests of security.

  The basement smelled of enamel paint, turpentine, sawdust, photographic chemicals, cigarettes and damp. Always good with his hands, Stanley built a workbench across the rear wall under the window overlooking the garden. He glued cork tiles to the wall to make a notice board on which he pinned an ever-changing selection of photographs and also a plan of the dolls’ house he was working on. He kept freestanding furniture to a minimum – a stool for use at the workbench; a two-seater sofa where he relaxed; and a low Victorian armchair with a button back and ornately carved legs. (The latter appeared and reappeared in many of Stanley’s photographs, usually with one or more occupants.)

  Finally, there was the tall cupboard built into the alcove on the left of the chimney breast. It had deep, wide shelves and was probably as old as the house. Stanley secured it with an enormous padlock.

  In the early days, the basement was forbidden territory to Eddie (and even later he entered it only by invitation). Usually the door was closed but once, as he passed through the hall, Eddie noticed that it was half-open. He crouched and peered down the stairs. Stanley was standing at the workbench examining a photograph with a magnifying glass.

  His father turned and saw him. ‘Hello, Eddie. I think Mummy’s in the kitchen.’ With the magnifying glass still in his hand he came towards the stairs, smiling widely in a way that made his cheeks bunch up like a cat’s. ‘Run along, now. There’s a good boy.’

  Eddie must have been five or six. He was not usually a bold boy – quite the reverse – but this glimpse of the unknown room had stimulated his curiosity. In his mind he cast about for a delaying tactic. ‘That door, Daddy. What’s the padlock for?’

  The smile remained fixed in place. ‘I keep dangerous things in the cupboard. Poisonous photographic chemicals. Very sharp tools.’ Stanley bent down and brought his cat’s smile very close to Eddie. ‘Think how dreadful it would be if there were an accident.’

  Eddie must have been about the same age when he overheard an episode which disturbed him, though at the time he did not understand it. Even as an adult he understood it only partly.

  It happened during a warm night in the middle of a warm summer. In summer Eddie dreaded going upstairs because he knew it would take him longer than usual to go to sleep. Pink and sweating, he lay in bed, holding a soft t
oy, vaguely humanoid but unisex, whom he called Mrs Wump. As so often happens in childhood, time stretched and stretched until it seemed to reach the borders of eternity. Eddie stroked himself, trying to imagine that he was stroking someone else – a cat, perhaps, or a dog; at that age he would have liked either. His palms glided over the curve of his thighs and slipped between his legs. He slid into a waking dream involving Mrs Wump and a soft, cuddly dog.

  The noises from the street diminished. His parents came upstairs. As usual his door was ajar; as usual neither of them looked in. He was aware of them following their usual routine – undressing, using the bathroom, returning to their bedroom. Some time later – it might have been minutes or even hours – he woke abruptly.

  ‘Ah – ah –’

  His father groaned: a long, creaking gasp unlike any other noise Eddie had heard him make; an inhuman, composite sound not unlike those he associated with the distant trains. Silence fell. This was worse than the noise had been. Something was very wrong, and he wondered if it could somehow be his fault.

  A bed creaked. Footsteps shuffled across the bedroom floor. The landing light came on. Then his mother spoke, her voice soft and vicious, carrying easily through the darkness.

  ‘You bloody animal.’

  One reason why Eddie liked Lucy Appleyard was because she reminded him of Alison. The resemblance struck him during the October half-term, when Carla took Lucy and the other children to the park. Eddie followed at a distance and was lucky enough to see Lucy on one of the swings.

  Alison was only a few months younger than Eddie. But when he had known her she could not have been much older than Lucy was now. The girls’ colouring and features were very different. The resemblance lay in how they moved, and how they smiled.

  Eddie did not even know Alison’s surname. When he was still at the infants’ school at the end of Rosington Road, she and her family had taken the house next door on a six-month lease. She had lived with her parents and older brother, a rough boy named Simon.

  The father made Alison a swing, which he hung from one of the trees at the bottom of their garden. One day, when Eddie was playing in the thicket at the bottom of the Graces’ garden, he discovered that there was a hole in the fence. One of the boards had come adrift from the two horizontal rails which supported them. The hole gave Eddie a good view of the swing, while the trees sheltered him from the rear windows of the houses.

  Alison had a mass of curly golden hair, neat little features and very blue eyes. In memory at least, she usually wore a short, pink dress with a flared skirt and puffed sleeves. When she swung to and fro, faster and faster, the air caught the skirt and lifted it. Sometimes the dress billowed so high that Eddie glimpsed smooth thighs and white knickers. She was smaller than Eddie, petite and alluringly feminine. If she had been a doll, he remembered thinking, he would have liked to play with her. In private, of course, because boys were not supposed to play with dolls.

  Eddie enjoyed watching Alison. Gradually he came to suspect that Alison enjoyed being watched. Sometimes she shifted her position on the swing so that she was facing the hole in the fence. She would sing to herself, making an elaborate pretence of feeling unobserved; at the time even Eddie knew that the pretence was not only a fake but designed to be accepted as such. She made great play with her skirt, allowing it to ride up and then smoothing it fussily over her legs.

  Memory elided the past. The sequence of events had been streamlined; inessential scenes had been edited out, and perhaps some essential ones as well. He remembered the smell of the fence – of rotting wood warmed by summer sunshine, of old creosote, of abandoned compost heaps and distant bonfires. Somehow he and Alison had become friends. He remembered the smooth, silky feel of her skin. It had amazed him that anything could be so soft. Such softness was miraculous.

  Left to himself, Eddie would never have broken through the back fence. There were two places behind the Graces’ garden, both of which were simultaneously interesting and frightening, though for different reasons: to the right was the corner of the plot on which the council flats had been built; and to the left was the area known to adults and children alike as Carver’s, after the company which had owned it before World War II.

  The council estate was too dangerous to be worth investigating. The scrubby grass around the blocks of flats was the territory of large dogs and rough children. Carver’s contained different dangers. The site was an irregular quadrilateral bounded to the north by the railway and to the south by the gardens of Rosington Road. To the east were the council flats, separated from Carver’s by a high brick wall topped with broken glass and barbed wire. To the west it backed on to the yards behind a terrace of shops at right angles to the railway. The place was a labyrinth of weeds, crumbling brick walls and rusting corrugated iron.

  According to Eddie’s father, Carver’s had been an engineering works serving the railway, and during a wartime bombing raid it had received a direct hit. In the playground at Eddie’s school, it was widely believed that Carver’s was haunted by the ghost of a boy who had died there in terrible, though ill-defined, circumstances.

  One morning Eddie arrived at the bottom of the Graces’ garden to find Alison examining the fence. On the ground at her feet was a rusting hatchet which Eddie had previously seen in the toolshed next door; it had a tall blade with a rounded projection at the top. She looked up at him.

  ‘Help me. The hole’s nearly large enough.’

  ‘But someone might see us.’

  ‘They won’t. Come on.’

  He obeyed, pushing with his hands while she levered with the hatchet. He tried not to think of ghosts, parents, policemen and rough boys from the council flats. The plank, rotting from the ground up, cracked in two. Eddie gasped.

  ‘Ssh.’ Alison snapped off a long splinter. ‘I’ll go first.’

  ‘Do you think we should?’

  ‘Don’t be such a baby. We’re explorers.’

  She wriggled head first into the hole. Eddie followed reluctantly. A few yards from the fence was a small brick shed with most of its roof intact. Alison went straight towards it and pushed open the door, which had parted company with one of its hinges.

  ‘This can be our place. Our special place.’

  She led the way inside. The shed was full of rubbish and smelled damp. On the right was a long window which had lost most of its glass. You could see the sky through a hole in the roof. A spider scuttled across the cracked concrete floor.

  ‘It’s perfect.’

  ‘But what do you want it for?’ Eddie asked.

  She spun round, her skirt swirling and lifting, and smiled at him. ‘For playing in, of course.’

  Alison liked to play games. She taught Eddie how to do Chinese burns, a technique learned from her brother. They also had tickling matches, all the more exciting because they had to be conducted in near silence, in case anyone heard. The loser, usually Eddie, was the one who surrendered or who was the first to make a noise louder than a whisper.

  There were other games. Alison, though younger than Eddie, knew many more than he did. It was she who usually took the lead. It was she who suggested the Peeing Game.

  ‘You don’t know it?’ Her lips formed an O of surprise, behind which gleamed her milk-white teeth and tip of her tongue. ‘I thought everyone knew the Peeing Game.’

  ‘I’ve heard about it. It’s just that I’ve never played it.’

  ‘My brother and I’ve been playing it for years.’

  Eddie nodded, hoping she would not expose his ignorance still further.

  ‘We need something to pee into.’ Alison took his assent for granted. ‘Come on. There must be something in here.’

  Eddie glanced round the shed. He was embarrassed even by the word ‘pee’. In the Grace household the activity of urination was referred to, when it was mentioned at all, by the euphemism ‘spending a penny’. His eye fell on an empty jam jar on a shelf at the back of the shed. The glass was covered on both sides with a film of gr
ime. ‘How about that?’

  Alison shook her head, and the pink ribbons danced in her hair. ‘It’s far too small. I can do tons more than that. Anyway, it wouldn’t do. The hole’s too small.’ Something of Eddie’s lack of understanding must have shown in his face. ‘It’s all right for you. You can just poke your willy inside. But with girls it goes everywhere.’

  Curiosity stirred in Eddie’s mind, temporarily elbowing aside the awkwardness. He picked up a tin. ‘What about this?’

  Alison examined it, her face serious. The tin was about six inches in diameter and had once contained paint. ‘It’ll do.’ She added with the air of one conferring a favour, ‘You can go first.’

  His muscles clenched themselves, as they did when he was about to step into cold water.

  ‘Boys always go first,’ Alison announced. ‘My brother Simon does.’

  There seemed no help for it. Eddie turned away from her and began to unbutton the flies of his khaki shorts. Without warning she appeared in front of him. She was carrying the paint tin.

  ‘You have to take your trousers and pants down. Simon does.’

  He hesitated. His lower lip trembled.

  ‘It’s only a game, stupid. Don’t be such a baby. Here – I’ll do it.’

  She dropped the tin with a clatter on the concrete floor. Brisk as a nurse, she undid the snakeskin buckle of his elasticated belt, striped with the colours of his school, green and purple. Before he could protest, she yanked down both the shorts and his Aertex pants in one swift movement. She stared down at him. He was ashamed of his body, the slabs of pink babyish fat that clung to his belly and his thighs. A boy at the swimming baths had once said that Eddie wobbled like a jelly.