The Tryst (8 page)

The house looked neither more nor less strange than before; an outcast, a relic, a misconception. Despite his delaying tactics, it was no time at all before Steve stood at the wrought-iron gate, in whose bars a potato crisp packet was trapped by the wind like rubbish in a weir. Somewhere nearby an empty beer can rattled noisily about in the gutter. Steve set off up the path of small tiles that curved past an anonymous shrub to the covered entrance where the steps began. Inside, in the hushed darkness, it already felt warmer. Steve climbed the steps one by one, making as little noise as he could. He felt as though anything at all might happen in the next few moments. It was therefore a slight disappointment as well as a relief when nothing did. The folded newspaper he placed in the letter-box just lay there. He pushed it all the way through and heard it flutter to the floor inside. The letter-box snapped shut again. That was all. He turned away, feeling tricked and cheated. Could he have imagined the incident a week before? Sometimes it was hard to tell where his dreams ended and his life began, what had really happened to him and what had occurred in one of those gaps where the normal rules are suspended and someone you think is asleep turns out to be dead on the bed in front of you, in the room you can’t get out of no matter how hard you try.

Behind him there was a jarring shudder, as though the whole wall had opened. When he turned, a faint line of light was visible at the edge of the front door. Steve could just make out a figure standing inside. Something white appeared in the opening, fluttering in the darkness like a flag of truce. It was an envelope. Steve reached out and gingerly gripped the corner. The other end was instantly released. He could make out nothing of the figure within except for the eyes, brilliant and restless, busily at work, running over the boy’s face and clothing like a pair of scavenging mice, speedy and discreet but missing nothing. Then the door snapped shut. The next moment it looked as though it had not been opened for years.

The list was a lot longer this time, and two five-pound notes were enclosed. It added up to quite a fair weight, too. By now Steve was used to the heavy slingful of papers, but by the time he had finished his round the strap had worn a welt across his shoulder that made it quite painful to carry this additional load, so he decided to stop for a rest. On the way back from the supermarket there was a small park, a triangle of grass intersected by an asphalt path where elderly people stood looking airily around while their panicky-eyed dogs laboured to expel sausage-like turds. Just inside the railings at the entrance to the park was a building providing similar facilities for MEN and OMEN, and Steve had discovered that this was a good place for a rest. You were sheltered from the wind and the rain, and one of the cubicles had a broken window which let in a bit of fresh air to dilute the stink of disinfectant and stale pee. Here Steve would settle down and read through the stories. The walls were covered in them, rambling, repetitive, unpunctuated tales about soiled panties and schoolboys’ bums. By now he’d read them all at least once, but knowing what happened and how it all ended just made them more reassuring and relaxing. Surprise, in Steve’s experience, was an overrated quality.

When he came out, the wind was stronger than ever. His sodden clothes hung stiffly from his body. He suddenly felt tired and hungry and cold, no longer interested in what was going to happen when he got to the house. He turned into Paxton Grove, the street before Grafton Avenue, and trudged the last few hundred yards to the corner. He was still only half-way up the covered steps when he noticed that the front door of the house was open again. Just a crack at first, but as Steve got nearer the gap started to widen. A wave of warmth reached out and enfolded the boy. There were odours in it, intimate and familiar as the smell of his own body. Half-hidden behind the door was a man wrinkled beyond measure, crumpled and shrunk, fabulously old. His skin was dark and blotchy, ridged and troughed with blood vessels and tendons. Only the eyes looked more or less ordinary, which gave them a freakish, alien appearance in that ruined face, as though he had stolen them.

‘Come in,’ he urged, beckoning with a hand which resembled one of the bits of chicken that Steve had sometimes found in rubbish bins but learned to reject as inedible. The boy hesitated. The warmth was still flowing out of the open doorway, as though from a limitless reservoir. Its swirling embrace made him feel light-headed and confused.

‘Tea’s made,’ the old man said.

His eyes never ceased their radar-like sweeps, and in their restless movement Steve read an anxiety even greater than his own. What worried him was the idea that this old man might not really be an old man at all, that once the front door was closed he would start laughing maniacally and then pull off his face and head to reveal the blood-streaked features of the demon beneath, like in Dave’s fave video. But there seemed to be no signs that anything of that sort was likely to happen. The man looked no different from any of the other old people Steve had seen making their slow, painful, lonely way along the streets, as though doing penance for some crime. And although he wasn’t aware of it, the smells and the warmth of the house were whispering to him all the time, telling him that no harm could come to him there. Hoisting the orange sling with a certain professional flair, the boy stepped over the threshold.

Like the house itself, the hallway was tall and narrow. It was lit by a single bulb enveloped in a large bowl of milky glass, which muffled the light so effectively that Steve could only just make out a flight of stairs reaching up to the invisible ceiling and a door standing open into a large front room whose windows were smothered in velvet curtaining. When the old man had finished locking and bolting the front door, he turned the other way, down a long corridor with brass-handled doors opening off it to either side. The walls were covered in discoloured paper decorated with a design of small flowers in diagonal rows. Floorboards creaked beneath the thin runner of threadbare red carpeting. Steve’s fear was still there, but dreamily distanced, like pain by a partial anaesthetic. He had an absurd feeling that they had already walked further than the length of the house. It was no use looking back to correct this illusion, for the old man had already paused to switch off the light behind them.

The corridor came to an end in a cramped alcove with a ceiling that Steve could almost touch. A set of narrow steps ran down to the basement as steeply as a ladder.

‘Nearly there,’ the old man muttered, starting down.

Steve followed, his dreamlike lack of anxiety still intact. As they descended, it got darker and warmer. At the bottom, Steve actually bumped into the old man, who had stopped, groping for a switch, and this first physical contact between them shocked him almost as much as the time he had touched Tracy’s arm accidentally on purpose. Then everything went black as the old man switched off the light at the head of the stairs.

‘Bulb’s gone down here,’ he explained.

Oddly, crazily really, Steve remained unafraid, following the old man forward into a darkness that revealed itself, once he grew used to it, as not quite solid. The leakage of light from somewhere up ahead was just sufficient to reveal the outlines of the old man’s figure and the doorways and openings of passages to either side. At last they reached the source of the glimmer, a door standing slightly ajar. Inside, the heat was overpowering. The smells whose tendrils had crept out of the front door were rooted in it, rank and exotic as tropical foliage.

The old man pointed out a large table in the centre of the room. It was draped in a dark red oilskin on which lay a bottle half full of milk, a shiny brown porcelain teapot, a pair of trousers, two chipped mugs with spoons in them, a bag of sugar and a grimy towel. Steve dumped the orange sling on the table and started to unpack the plastic bags of groceries.

‘They didn’t have Fry’s cocoa,’ he said.

‘Never mind,’ the old man said. ‘We’ll just have to make do, somehow.’

Two drying racks suspended on pulleys from the ceiling supported an assortment of shirts, underclothes and bedlinen, which formed a canopy over the centre of the room. An enormous armchair was drawn up before the cast-iron kitchen range which occupied one entire wall. Both walls and woodwork were covered in thick glossy paint of a creamy yellow shade, the floor in a sheet of dull red linoleum, which was starting to crack and blister and break away from its backing in places.

‘And you are?’ the old man demanded abruptly.

Steve unpacked a tin of Spam.

‘What?’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Steve.’

The old man poured tea into the two mugs.

‘Ernest Matthews,’ he said. ‘How do you like it?’

Steve looked round the room. On the wall opposite stood an enormous sideboard in whose nooks and crannies were lodged shirtstuds, a leadless pencil, stamp edging, several keys, a large seashell, a stuffed weasel, overflowing ashtrays, a magnifying glass, a selection of dried-up fountain pens, buttons, endless scraps of paper, drawing pins, pipecleaners, a cut-throat razor, empty jam jars, coins, pieces of bone, and half a hundred things whose name and purpose, if they had either, Steve did not know. Every single object was covered, as if by protective cotton wool, in a thick even layer of dust. The corner opposite the door was occupied by a bed consisting of a metal frame with a wire mesh to support the mattress. The blankets were thrown back to reveal unclean wrinkled sheets. The pillow still bore the imprint of a sleeping head.

Ernest Matthews glanced at him.

‘Eh? Speak up, lad!’ he said sharply. ‘My ears aren’t what they were. How do you like it?’

‘It’s all right.’

He hoped that this, high praise to the stotters, would do.

‘
What’
s all right?’ the old man asked with a bemused expression.

Steve shrugged.

‘Everything.’

‘Well I’m very pleased to hear it, I’m sure!’ the old man snapped. ‘However, I wasn’t asking about everything, I was asking about the tea. How do you like it? Weak? Strong? With or without? Just a dash? One lump or two?’

After a pause, Steve said he didn’t know.

‘Don’t know!’ Matthews exclaimed, with a laugh that sounded like a crumpled sheet of plastic film unwrapping itself. ‘Well, bless my soul, I’d never thought I’d live to hear a British lad say such a thing.’

He added milk and sugar to both mugs.

‘You
are
British, I take it?’

‘I can’t stay long,’ Steve replied.

‘Mum and Dad expecting you back, are they? Time for a cup of tea, though. Was there any change from that tenner, by the by?’

Steve laid a handful of coins on the oilcloth. The old man separated fifty pence from the rest.

‘That’s for you. Have a cake and drink your tea before it stews.’

Matthews took a mug of tea and walked over to the armchair by the stove. When he was settled, he unrolled a tobacco pouch of waxed cloth and started to fill a pipe which he dug out of the creases of the chair.

‘You’re dripping all over the lino,’ he remarked to Steve. ‘Haven’t you got a proper coat? You’ll catch your death, you mark my words.’

Steve sat down on one of the straight-backed dining chairs drawn up to the table and started to sip his tea. Meanwhile the old man took a large brass lighter from another crevice of the armchair and produced a flame of impressive dimensions with which he proceeded to scorch the uppermost layer of tobacco in his pipe.

‘Hot in here,’ Steve ventured, to break the silence.

Ernest Matthews nodded.

‘And do you know the beauty of it?
They don’t have to come in the house
. There’s a coal-hole round the side, drops straight down into a bunker next door to the scullery.’

He turned his attention to his pipe again. Between puffs the smoke rose from the bowl in an enigmatic curl, like a lock of hair. Steve took one of the cakes out of the box and carefully peeled away its silver case, which was pleated like an old lady’s skirt. Matthews opened a door in the stove and prodded the glowing coals with a brass-handled poker.

‘The milkman does eggs and bread and potatoes and butter and cheese,’ he went on, ‘but everything else I’ve had to do without. My legs are not what they were, you see. Fifty pence a week and tea thrown in, with a cake or some biscuits, whatever’s going. What do you say?’

Steve gulped down the rest of his tea and picked the crumbs of the cake off the table with a moistened forefinger.

‘I got to be going,’ he said, standing up.

The way back along the basement passage, up the stairs and along the corridor seemed much shorter. Almost too soon, Steve found himself back in the chilly hallway. Before opening the front door, Matthews knelt down, lifted the flap of the letter-box and looked out for a long time.

‘Can’t be too careful,’ he remarked. ‘Times being what they are.’

Outside it was really cold. Steve told the old man he’d see him the following week and then ran off quickly. His thoughts, as he walked back to Trencham Road, were about money. The change which he had been told to keep the previous week had come to only a few pence in the end, and Steve had spent it on sweets, which he’d eaten on the way home. But if the old man was going to give him fifty pence every week that posed a problem. There was nowhere he could hide the money that the stotters might not look, nothing he could spend it on that they would not see. He didn’t even want to think about what they might do if they found out that he’d been cheating them. The fate of his predecessors on the delivery round had been widely reported in the local media. One of the pensioners had sustained a dislocated hip, the other several fractured ribs. Dave admitted that once he got going he found it hard to stop. So the only course open to Steve really was to hand over the extra money, but it was going to be hard to explain this unexpected 25 per cent increase in the money he got for doing the paper round. He was still trying to think up a suitable story when he came to the main road he had to cross to get home. The traffic was heavy, as usual at this hour. It was while he was standing there, looking for an opening and worrying about what he was going to tell the stotters, that the grinning man appeared for the second time, bearing down on Steve like a demented soldier marching to destruction.