Dispossession (8 page)

On the floor also were scatter rugs in more contrasting
colours and patterns, and a radio one side of the futon, my teddy bear the
other.

o0o

Adolphus Bear: named I knew not how or by whom, more
commonly called Little Hitler by my mother, in response to my shrill and
constant cry, “Dolphus
needs
it!
Now...!
”

I didn’t in fact remember that, I only remembered her
telling me about it often as I grew, ladling out the guilt in heavy, sticky
measure,
see what you put me through, you wretched
infant?

What I did remember, I remembered how crucial Adolphus had
been in my childhood, a constant and reliable companion, both qualities sadly
absent in my home life; how he had been outgrown in my teenage, hidden but not
discarded; how he had been rediscovered almost—
almost
—as
a joke in my student years, and then laid aside again, I thought for good this
time, when Carol proved a better comfort, constant and reliable and much more
fun in bed.

And suddenly here he was again, like a statement of recent
need:
don’t believe everything she tells you,
Jonty
, she had to be letting me down somewhere. Fun in bed I was
prepared to take on trust, but constancy? Reliability?

Maybe it was only the short time I’d been with her, not long
enough to be certain. Maybe I’d rooted Adolphus out as a precaution, or maybe
again as a joke. Almost a joke. Whatever, he was here; and never mind how I’d
been feeling when I brought him here, I was exceeding glad to see him now.

Had him cradled where I liked him best to be, snug in the
crook of my arm, when Sue walked in and found me so.

“Hah!” she said. Not sneering, just teasing. “Having a
cuddle, huh?”

And she stepped up close and made it a three-way without
invitation, just assuming; and I was physically knackered and emotionally
overwrought and didn’t even act unfriendly, never mind push her away.

Then, her head short of my shoulder and gazing up, she said,
“Do you want to take him back to hospital with you? When we go?”

“Yes.” No question, no doubt in my mind.

“Okay. I guess I should’ve brought him in before. Only I
wasn’t sure, I didn’t want the nurses laughing at him...”

“Oh, and I suppose you never laughed at him, right?”

“That’s different,” she said. “I’m entitled.”

And she tucked her arm through mine and urged me—us—gently
out of the bedroom; and en route she said, “You don’t remember, do you? Me
laughing, I mean?”

“No. I was hypothesising.” Then I nodded down the passage,
and said, “What’s down there?”

“Spare bedroom. Your wardrobe, and it’s doubling as a study,
sort of, all the bloody books and paperwork you bring home from your job. And
no,” she said, holding fast, “you can’t go see. I’m not letting you anywhere
near till you’re a hell of a lot better. Work doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me,” I murmured, thinking seriously for the
first time about financial matters. Sick pay and insurance and such. The joint
mortgage I’d held with Carol, what had happened to that? Was I still paying my
share? And then, moving on from there because I didn’t want to linger, but with
my mind running on tracks of money, “So what, are you renting this place off
your brother,”
getting it dirt cheap
, “is
that it?”

“No,” and her voice was clipped and tight suddenly, almost
wary, almost angry, somewhere between the two. “It’s mine. Why?”

Come this far, might as well be blunt about it. Besides, I
had a habit of honesty, though it had never done me much good in my profession
and rarely in my private life either, and looked like doing a little more
damage now. “Because you couldn’t possibly afford a flat like this on the wages
they’d pay you downstairs.” I’d never done a professional conveyance, that wasn’t
my area of interest; but none the less I was professionally very well informed
about property prices in the city, and this flat wouldn’t come in under six
figures.

“Jonty,” still with a bite in her voice but I couldn’t see
her face now as she talked, as she steered me back into the living-room and
pushed me onto the nearest of those long sofas, “you’re not thinking.
Sweetheart. I’m Chinese, yes? Triads, Jonty. Drugs and vice, Jonty. The club is
just a cover. Actually I’m a gangster’s moll,” and she had her back to me now
and was walking away, and just from the way she walked I could see that all
wariness was gone from her now, and she was nothing but angry.

Fair enough, I supposed. I hadn’t been thinking Triads, that
was too lurid even for my mind or for this city, for both; but I guess I had been
thinking scam, one way or another. My mind made these calculations
automatically, probable income against visible expenditure, and right now
alarm-bells were clattering and jangling, and I thought I’d married a crook.

Only she was so mad with me, so scathing, suddenly it didn’t
seem likely at all.
Open mouth, insert foot.
Not such a hot beginning, to a life of wedded bliss...

When she came back, with a black lacquer tray of fine
porcelain tea-things and none of that looked cheap either, she still wasn’t
looking at me. She hitched the table over with one foot, put the tray down and
sat cross-legged on the floor, the other side from me. And I said,

“Oy.”

“What?”

“Thought you were supposed to be my moll?”

At least that brought her head up, gave me the benefit of
her baleful stare full-frontal. “I’m your
wife
,”
spat out at me, and for a moment nothing more than that; but then, “I suppose
you can’t help being a suspicious sod,” she said. “In the circumstances.”

“Maybe not, but that’s no excuse for being an offensive sod.
I’m sorry, Sue. It’s none of my business anyway, where your money comes from.”

“Of course it is, fool,” she said, smiling a little now, but
only a little. “We’re partners, and
I
don’t
mind sharing,” with a stress there that obviously meant something, though I
didn’t know what. “I did offer to go halvers on everything. You wouldn’t wear
that, but we are running a joint account. Besides, this is family stuff, you
need to know. I nearly said ‘family history’ there,” she went on with a little
sniff, “can you believe it? That’s how it feels, almost, ’specially with me
having to tell it like a story that’s over; but it mustn’t, it’s too soon for
that...”

“You don’t have to,” I said quickly as she broke off,
turning her face away to watch her fingers fumble for a cigarette. If it could
do this, if it was so oppressive that it could smother her fires and have her
muttering and evasive, saying anything now to avoid telling it straight, then I
thought maybe it was a story I didn’t want to hear. Not yet, at any rate, and
not from Sue.

But, “Yes, I do,” she said, lighting up and scowling at me
through the smoke. “I said, it’s family. Pour the bloody tea.”

She got to her feet with an easy twist of her body,
look, no hands
, and walked a few paces over to
the fireplace. I checked the tea tray: pot, strainer, fragile handleless cups
on saucers. No milk or sugar. Okay, I was on top of this, at least. I filled
both cups and held one snug in my hands, inhaling fragrant steam, as she came
back with an ashtray in one hand and a framed photo in the other.

“What is this?” I asked, watching her settle neatly down
again.

“Gui Hua,” she said neutrally.

“Smells good.”

“That’s nice. It’s your favourite. Here, look,” holding the
photo out across the table; and, “Take it, for God’s sake,” as I hesitated,
trying to kink my head at a difficult angle to do what she’d told me first,
what I thought she wanted, to look without touching. I was getting ahead of her
here, suspecting the story and half afraid that a smeared fingerprint on a
picture-frame might turn out to be a blasphemous transgression against a sacred
relic.

But I took it when she swore at me, teacup in one hand and
frame in the other; and the photo in the frame was an informal portrait of a
young Chinese man, all leather and shades and posed casually leaning in the
doorway of his club; and he really did look Triad, he looked lean and dangerous
and deeply, deeply dodgy.

“My brother,” Sue said, unnecessarily. And, “He’s dead now,”
she said, and that was unnecessary also.

“It was his club,” she said. “He bought the top two floors
here when they were nothing, just a shell. He worked like shit, he hired
builders to do the conversion downstairs but he worked with them, just an
unskilled labourer but it meant he was there all the time, he knew what was
happening. He got muscles and the work got done, he used to say, that made it
worthwhile twice over. And he was learning all the time too, so when the club
was finished he could start up here and do most of it himself, him and a couple
of mates. He loved this flat...”

And you loved him
, I
thought, only that wasn’t strong enough, or didn’t seem to be. I’d say she’d
worshipped him, near enough. And her face was twitching again, control starting
to crumble as she gazed around this place her brother had made, likely
untouched since he had made it and the whole damn flat was the relic, we were
sitting in a shrine.

“How the hell did he finance it?” I asked, the question
deliberately intrusive and factual both. Call me a sweetheart, as she had,
albeit nastily; or else call me a martyr, probing known sensitivities purely to
achieve a response already tasted once. Didn’t matter whether she chose to
answer, or simply told me to fuck off. Either one would give her a moment of
emotional distance, a chance to catch her breath.

Her lips tightened, her eyes narrowed; briefly, the salt of
martyrdom was on my lips. But then she shrugged,
what
the hell
, and told me.

“He got backers. Not the banks, he tried them and they
wouldn’t, not so much for a guy his age. But we’re a community, right? That’s
how they always talk about us, the Chinese community, they say; and there aren’t
that many of us. Anyone I don’t know, I know someone who does. And a lot of us
are successful, lots of businessmen, entrepreneurs. You know. The sort of
people who are always looking for another slice of the pie. And this was right
in our own territory, and that made a difference too; so he did it, he raised
the money a piece here and a piece there. And the club was a hit from the start,
he never had any problem with repayments. And then he died, and he had loads of
insurance, that paid everybody off; and he’d made a will, hadn’t he? Bastard
never told me, but he made a will and left it all to me. So the club’s mine,
and this flat is mine, and all of it free and clear, no mortgages or
anything...”

She’d be a rich young woman, then, at least on paper. And
she clearly enjoyed that for its own sake, and just as clearly hated it for the
thing that had caused it, her brother’s death; and I wasn’t sure how thin this
ice was that I was treading now, but, “Did I,” I said hesitantly, “God, I’m
sorry I have to ask, but did I meet him?”

Her eyes widened; she’d obviously forgotten how that might
be a factor. “Oh. No, you never knew Jacky. It was just after Christmas he was
killed. Before I met you.”

Killed
, she’d said this
time. Again I didn’t want to ask, but again I did. “How did it happen?”

“He was killed,” she said, “murdered.” And took a breath to
tell me how, though it wasn’t the air that she needed, it was the time between,
the space the air allowed; and I made use of that time myself, unexpectedly
remembering. I’d been waiting to hear of an accident; but murder triggered
memory, because this was very much my area of expertise and yes, I did know
already but no, I didn’t say so, I only sat quiet and let her tell me.

“He was
dragged
to
death,” she said, using what was obviously her own bitter word for it, because
there wasn’t an obvious one in the language. “They put handcuffs on his wrists,
and tied them to the back of a van; and then they drove him all round the ring
road at three in the morning, going down the fast lane good and hard.”

Yes. What I remembered mostly was the jokes, murmured around
the Magistrates’ Courts for the following week or two: all the cracks about a
Chinese takeaway, and No 24 to go, and “If you don’t like the way I drive, why
don’t you get out and wok?” Neither clever nor funny, but that’s how it takes
the trade sometimes: something dreadful suddenly becomes a source, a pattern-book
for any weak pun that can be dredged up. Maybe that’s just how we deal with it.
How we men deal with it, it’s generally the blokes—and the more blokeish
women—join in with this.

The jokes, and the photographs. I remembered the photos too,
which was maybe why I remembered the jokes. Maybe why there’d been so many of
them, because we’d all of us seen the photos.

In my mind, in my memory the pictures came in order, like a
zoom in slow motion. Whether that was how I’d actually seen them, I couldn’t say;
it seemed unlikely. More probably this was my own job of sorting, keeping
things neat. But how I remembered them, the distant shot was first, was top of
the heap.

A van pulled up on a stretch of hard shoulder, photographed
from above and behind, seemingly from a bridge across the road. Cold morning
light, low sun and long shadows; and nothing to see at this distance except the
van and what it trailed, something dark and shapeless, only a blotch a few
metres down the tarmac. A line, a thread suggested a tether, didn’t prove it.

Next photo. Ground level, and closer: the tether visibly a
rope now, tied around the van’s rear bumper. What was tethered was still
undefined, still nameless, but it had form enough to be a threat now, to work
on deeper levels of the mind, to whisper darkly below the threshold of voice or
reason.

Next photo. Closer still. What the van had dragged filled
the frame, and declared itself at last.
Suckered
you this close, didn’t I, drew you closer than you wanted to be, before you
were certain? Before your eyes could find me out, or your brain allow it?
A body it was for sure, it had all the attributes a child paints in for
identity’s sake: two arms, two legs, a torso to join them with a head atop. But
this was a body most unbeautiful, a body stripped down to its most bare
essentials. Skinned and shredded like meat under a tiger’s tongue, rasped down
in places to the bone beneath and that chipped and broken where it showed.