The Devil's Playground (3 page)

his eyelids down hard as if that would be enough to expunge

this vision. And it almost was.

Jon rubbed his ankle. Dante could not have found words

to describe this pain. Maybe the doctor had been mistaken.

It seemed to be getting worse rather than better, a slow and

dull throb that had become all insistent making him feel as

if he was wearing an iron boot. He’d taken some painkillers

M

and now, as he stared out at the people withdrawing money,

huddling around the cashpoint like conspirators sharing a

secret, he felt so angry, so ashamed for what had happened

that morning.

He’d been on the bus, standing on the exposed edge of

the Routemaster, when he’d seen Jake, the tramp, walking

along Oxford Street, or at least thought he’d seen him. Looking

back on it now he realized that the man had been shorter,

moved in a different way. Jon had jumped off the bus, hit

the ground and went flying, face-down in the street. The bus

behind screeched to a stop. He could smell the black smoke

spewing from its front and hear the driver cursing.

Everyone was staring at him. The constantly moving mass

of pedestrians had stopped dead in their tracks and was

watching with an unnerving intensity, a sort of group spirit

that seizes people in the vicinity of an accident. He smiled,

tried to get up and collapsed straight back on to the asphalt,

unable to stifle unmanly screams of pain. His ankle felt

broken. He was sure of it.

He tried again. Arrows of pain shot up his legs, his stomach

lurched, the earth shifted and spun. This is what happens

when you black out, he thought and slumped back down,

surrendering to gravity. He lay on the road, paralysed by pain

and embarrassment, hoping the police, or someone — anyone — would come and get him out of this.

The doctor had said the ankle was only sprained but it felt

like it was broken. The doctor had suggested a pair of

crutches, ease the weight off it for a couple of days, but Jon

had refused, horrified at the thought of trying to navigate

London on anything but two good legs.

Had he really thought it was Jake? Or only hoped so much,

desired it to such an extent that it had become real? For the

first time, he understood how much he wanted it to have

been the old man. The way he’d spent the past week searching

the faces of the crumpled figures on the streets for him,

wondering if he’d driven him out or if it was something else,

one of the demons that haunted his past, hoping somehow,

against everything, that he’d still come back, ring the buzzer,

act as though nothing had …

The phone made him jump. He peeled himself away from

the window, eyes squinting at the light. He fumbled for the

receiver. He had put his phone number in a book he’d given

Jake. Perhaps the old man was calling him.

‘Jon Reed.’ Breathless with an underlay of expectancy, a

slight tremulous uplift of tone.

‘It’s me, Jon. Just calling to check on progress.’

Jon exhaled, his heart slowed, he reached for his cigarettes.

He couldn’t tell his editor that he hadn’t started yet. Not

with the deadline at noon tomorrow. He couldn’t begin to

explain.

‘It’s going fine,’ he said, lighting a cigarette.

‘That’s good to hear. And how are you?’ There was always

this rigmarole of genial inquiry following the reminder.

‘I’m fine,’ he replied, disappointed, though he knew there

was no chance that Jake would call, but disappointed none

the less.

*You still have your guest staying?’

His boss had a way of turning even the most innocuous

word, ‘guest’ for instance, into a pejorative oozing loathing,

bile and suspicion.

‘No.’

‘Good. Crazy thing, Jon. Could have got yourself killed.

Or worse. Think about it. Drugged, raped and video-taped.

Before you know it you’re big in Bangkok. A star in Singapore.

Maybe it’s already happened. Maybe you didn’t even

realize.’

‘Thanks, Dave, but I don’t need you to make me any

more paranoid than I already am.’ He wanted to get off the

phone, check the window again.

‘I still don’t understand you, Jon. What did you think you

were trying to achieve?’

‘I thought that…’

‘What? I can’t hear you.’

He was mumbling. He coughed, spoke again. ‘I was drunk.

I thought it would be a good thing to do. Something that I

found hard, that would challenge me. I didn’t want to just

give money every now and then. I wanted to see if I really

was what I believed myself to be.’

‘For someone so cynical, Jon, you really are endearingly

naive.’ Dave chuckled to himself. ‘Tomorrow noon. Don’t

blow this one.’

Jon put the receiver down. His fists were clenched and his

jaw tight. Why did such an act as inviting an old man off the

streets cause such astonishment in people? Shouldn’t it have

been the other way around?

He tried to breathe deeply but that didn’t work. It only

made his chest hurt. He smoked a cigarette down fast and

that was better.

The job was a massive task of sub-editing, link-checking

and laying out of a to-be-launched-tomorrow website for a

derivation of Shiatsu called Seiki. He lit another cigarette and

stared at the page in front of him. Japanese characters and

dense little packets of text. Tiny annotated diagrams. The

body mapped and reduced to a flow-chart. Many hyperlinks.

His head spun. Everything began to merge. Lines slipped

over and under each other, entwined. Photos blurred, ran

down the page like water.

He forced himself to concentrate. He had chosen this

after all, he had to keep reminding himself, and it was better

than writing. There was no responsibility involved here, he

was a gardener pruning and tidying up someone else’s creation.

He was the invisible ghost that lived in the spaces

between. And that was good, that was the way he liked

it. There were only the hard, sure rules of grammar and

apostrophe, the tight strictures of syntax, like the cloistered

halls of a cathedral, there to keep everything in check.

Once he had written. Oh yeah. Published a small, hexagonal

quarterly music journal that had been read by the industry

and perhaps no one else. He’d prided himself on the

integrity of content, the eschewing of fads, the reliance on

treating each record on its own merits.

And then he’d written that review.

Nothing much, at the time. Three hundred words about

a bad country album that was getting good press. The review

mentioned medieval torture devices and Noriega. The review

was funny. It was honest and straight, though he would now

admit that there was a certain relish in the rhetoric of the

piece. He received a oneline email from the artist thanking

him for his knowledgeable and erudite review. He received

a small and scrunched-up newspaper clipping, a fortnight

later, from the man’s wife, now widow, after the singer had

hanged himself in an EconoLodge two blocks away from his

own home.

Everyone told him it wasn’t his fault. These things happen.

They cited examples. They bought him drinks and said fuck

it. But he couldn’t and so, quietly and without much fuss, he

folded the magazine and retired to the indoor life, the pull

of a small room, the way it feels almost like an extra layer of

clothing protecting you from the world.

He’d cut out the review and had pressed it under the glass

of a cheap clip-frame, sometimes, he thought, to remind him

of the smallness of this thing that had loomed so large, as if

there, framed and sequestered, it had been made discrete,

answerable only to itself. But at other times he looked at

it and it winked back, a confirmation of his worst and

darkest fears.

But that was four years ago, he thought, tapping his fingers

on the desk, looking for a way into this grid of blinking

pixels. Four years, and he somehow understood that those

years, that era even, as he could now call it, had come to an

end the day he had invited a homeless man called Jake into

his flat.

Jake had always stood by the cashpoint. A tall, bearded man

in a blue lumberjack shirt and a pair of faded jeans, barefoot,

whispering almost inaudibly out of the side of his mouth,

never seeming to ask for change from the blank-faced

passers-by. Jon hadn’t even noticed him at first, so used to

avoiding unnecessary glances in the London streets that the

tramp made no impression. When he did begin to notice him,

he was amused at how the man so resembled Hemingway, as

if he were a strayed contestant from one of those lookalike

competitions held annually in Florida.

As the long days of sunlight dragged through the first part

of September, he grew more and more intrigued with the

tramp. He’d been giving him money whenever he went past,

he couldn’t help doing that, was always doing that, and they

were now on nodding terms; a brief hello, a morning smile.

Jake was so different from the other homeless men, almost

Dickensian characters crouched in doorways, defeated and

bent, or swaying drunkenly in front of shops full of gleaming

objects. There was a certain dignity to Jake, in his rake-like

posture and eyes that always met yours, that even the streets

had not managed to scrape off.

Jon began to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking

about him. He would get up from the computer and sneak

peeks through the net curtains. Watch as the man arrived

every morning, always carrying a pile of books and a notepad,

though he’d never seen him using them. He speculated, spun

stories, and imagined a spectrum of possibilities as he strolled

through his own dull daily life. It was a way of writing,

invisible writing that harmed no one, a way of passing the

time. He had him as an undercover police agent, a former

man of good standing gone to pot after the death of a

spouse, an escaped child molester, and sometimes, in his

most fuzzy late-night haze, he convinced himself that it

was indeed the ghost of old Hem come back to beg in the

London streets.

Then the weather turned. Brooding black skies spread

overhead and the rain began its endless onslaught. The

gutters overflowed, clotted and sticky with dead leaves. The

days got shorter and harsher.

Jon found himself becoming - well, sometimes he admitted

it - a little obsessed, though he passed it off as just one

of those things that happens when nothing else happens.

His morning strolls were punctuated by the smile of the old

man, by his bare feet and by the faces of the people who

passed him by oblivious. When he walked up Notting Hill,

he saw the face of the tramp in every homeless person, on

every street corner, in their gap-toothed smiles and resigned

pleas, their ragged clothes and sad-eyed dogs.

Jon even started to feel disappointed when he looked out

in the morning and the tramp wasn’t there; it was as if his

day were incapable of starting without the old man. He had

got as used to seeing him as he was to his morning cigarette,

his first espresso. Like those things, the old man had somehow

become esssential to Jon’s life, an underlying recurrent,

something to hold it all together by, and he felt strangely

resentful of the tramp at times, as if his sole purpose was to

ensnare him in this need.

But he found himself returning to the window time and

again, unable to keep away, promising himself he would just

check and then get back to the TV, invariably spending the

night watching, wondering Who are you? Why do you draw me

like this? Are you a ghost?

As the weather worsened it tested his resolve. The thought

of inviting the old man to stay had, at first, seemed rash,

idealistic, the kind of thing his twelve-year-old self would

have done. He’d dismissed it instantly and given the old man

a fiver the next time he’d passed. But he kept watching from

the window. The rain constant and dark. The old man like a

statue standing still in the wet soup. And slowly the idea took

shape in his head. It had a certain clarity to it that he found

seductive. It was something so unusual, a wild leap, and he

knew that only such an act, such an un-Jon-like act, could

break through the ice he’d been petrified in these past

few years.

And he was scared. Absolutely terrified. He thought about

the old man slaughtering him in his sleep. He remembered

stories splashed across newspapers and TV discussions,

heads nodding in patronizing they-should-have-known

better gestures. Or how about: the old man stealing his

favourite CDs; the old man inviting a crew of juiceheads to

wreck the place; the old man burning down the flat.

He chided himself for thinking like this, for the spew and

sputter of images that seemed to come so readily. And this

was another reason to do it. Disprove all this bullshit once