The Keys to the Street (19 page)

Roman might have told the police something of Pharaoh’s life but they hadn’t asked him, and he had learned, while on the street, not to offer gratuitous information. There was no reason for them to suspect him of being the repository of Pharaoh’s secrets, if indeed he was, if the story told him one night on the canal bank was even true. Roman believed it was. Francie Quin, who had recounted it, was no more drunk on “milk” than he normally was and he offered the story without bursting into the jacks men’s mad laughter or their occasional growling belligerence. Everyone knew Pharaoh’s real name was Jimmy Clancy, but only Quin had discovered where his sobriquet came from. Back in the seventies, when very young, when still in his teens, he had been attached to a religious cult that roamed the country in battered vans and trucks and, like strolling players of old, performed on the roadside or in a field its own version of miracle and mystery plays. In one such play, a dramatized “Moses in the Bulrushes,” Clancy had played the King of Egypt, whose daughter finds Moses and brings him up. The title had stuck and he was Pharaoh thereafter.

It was in those days too that he had first, as was fashionable, put the blue tint on his hair. Or rather, his sister, a hairdresser, had done it for him. Quin fancied he had been schizophrenic since his teens, since before the time he joined the cult. Most of the members heard God talking to them, so there was nothing strange to be noted in Pharaoh’s behavior.

“Though it was more Satan than God, if you ask me,” said Quin. “An imp of Satan tormenting him. He was supposed to find the keys of the kingdom, whatever they might be.”

“The keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, Christ is said to have given
them to Peter,” said Roman, and because he didn’t want to seem a fount of knowledge, “or that’s what I’ve heard. Something like that. The pope would have them now.”

“They real then, are they? I mean, like what they lock up the park with?”

Roman said he didn’t think so, more a symbol, or a way of speaking, but Quin seemed to know what he meant. In the dark canal a full moon was reflected, like a round white light under the water. Trees trailed thin branches across its surface as if to catch the moon in their net. It could have been some broad sluggish river they sat beside, with dense vegetation growing down to its banks, a mass of complex leafiness that might have stretched, for all that could be seen, back across the city for miles, covering buildings in a dark wilderness. Perhaps the Nile had been like that, where Moses floated in his rushy cradle.

A reddish London sky was all scudded over with wisps of black cloud. Distantly the tall Edwardian blocks, palely lit with sodium and neon, gleamed like palaces, the castles in the sleeping wood. The sounds of the city, as light as they ever became, thinned and rarefied, throbbed softly through the earth.

The rest of the jacks men had gone home to their hostel in Camden, a place Quin avoided if he could elude the police and sleep in the park. He had collected his DSS money that day, so had brown ale instead of meths and water, and he passed the bottle. Roman took a swig so as not to be standoffish. “When he got bad they sectioned him and he was in this bin for most of the eighties. He come out four or five years back to what they call care in the community.” Quin gave a soft derisive laugh. “His mum gave him a bed for two nights. After that her and his stepfather changed the locks and he couldn’t get back. He didn’t know and he came back and tried his keys in the locks. Them was the keys he started with, the ones that wouldn’t open her door.”

“Where does he get them from? The rest of the keys, I mean?”

“Nicks them, God knows. He don’t never
use
them. They’re not the right ones, they don’t open the doors he wants open.”

“Lift up your heads, O ye gates,” Roman muttered, wishing immediately afterward that he hadn’t.

But Quin seemed gratified. “That’s right. Say some more.”

So Roman said, “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in …”

“You want to say that to Pharaoh,” said Quin. “He’d like that, would Pharaoh.”

But remembering the religious cult, Roman said, “I’ve no doubt he knows it already.” Whether the police had actually spoken to Pharaoh he couldn’t tell. He looked at newsboards, half-expecting to read of another murder, but there was nothing. Of Effie there had been no sign since the day they found John Dominic Cahill’s body and he had told her to leave the gardens. But he sensed among the men and the occasional woman who slept rough on the borders of the park, a new tension, an awareness of danger and threat, as if nemesis had come to disturb their precarious peace.

The weather was mild, though still cold at night. He took his clothes and one of his blankets to the launderette in Baker Street. His old winter-worn trainers he threw away and bought a new pair. The best time of year was coming for the street sleepers. It was not until you slept on doorsteps that you realized real summer only comes to England after midsummer is past and in those short months perhaps a mere four or five nights will be warm.

On one of those, in the first week of June, he slept in the open on Primrose Hill, hoping to see the stars. But even up there the sky was overcast by some unnatural vapor and suffused from below by a reddish artificial light. He lay awake for a long time, remembering Elizabeth’s interest in astronomy and how he had read it up to keep pace with her just as he had bought himself a book on pond life so that he might know what Daniel was talking about. But very little life of any kind remained in English ponds, fertilizers and insecticides
had seen to that, and the stars were no longer visible from a West Hampstead garden.

He could conjure up their three faces as they had been when last he saw them, but now as he did so he thought how he had frozen them in the ice of his present. Had they lived they would no longer look like that. Sally would, but Elizabeth would be nearly seventeen now, a young woman, and as for Daniel—at perhaps no time once babyhood is past does the face change so much as it does between eight and ten, and Daniel would be ten now. So he, their father, was looking at a mirage, at outdated photographs, at lost lives gone beyond any real recall.

For the first time since he had taken to the street he thought of the future. Up until this moment there had only been the past and the present, for he supposed, though he had never put this into uttered or silent words, that he would not long survive, that life could not support so much pain. Men have died from time to time, he quoted to himself, and worms have eaten them, but not of love. Not of grief either, it seemed. The future stretched before him, the door to it had opened at last, and on the other side he saw, white and rolling uphill, an infinite street on which the homeless slept and he among them.

•   •   •

If Carl had said it once he had said it a hundred times, that he didn’t want Hob coming upstairs. Well, he could come up for a social call if he wanted, but Hob never made social calls. He only wanted one thing and Carl was ready enough to supply it, but not at home, not in front of Leo.

Hob knew all that but he was desperate. He wasn’t just in a state, this was the mother of all states. It was the worst he’d ever known since that time he’d spent all one night in a cell and they wouldn’t give him anything, not even one of those new type antihistamines. They’d had a good laugh at his expense, it had been the funniest thing they’d seen in months.

He knew he was getting bad when he could hear the mice. According to Carl there was a mouse for every person in the British Isles, which made about fifty-eight million, and most of them lived in the walls of Redferry House. Or that was Hob’s opinion. Another thing he’d heard was that no matter where you were, city or countryside, you were never more than six feet from a rat. His sister had told him you could be sitting somewhere really upmarket, like the bar of a classy hotel, and there’d be a rat lurking inside the wall behind you or outside the window with the velvet curtains. But it was mice he heard, running around and scratching behind the skirting board. Or, rather, he heard them when he was in a state. The rest of the time he didn’t hear them or else he didn’t care. He’d start feeling shaky, weak, and old, and his muscles would jump and then he’d hear the scratching.

It was hard to say what came first, the panic attack when everything frightened him—the air itself, the light, just having his eyes open, any sort of movement—or the mice scratching. There was very little furniture in his first-floor flat, only a brown vinyl couch with Mickey Mouse scatter cushions and the mattress he slept on and of course the TV, and there was never much food. He usually kept in a packet of Weetabix and one of cream crackers, for his health’s sake. But the night before he’d drunk a lot of vodka in lieu of anything better, eaten a Weetabix to get something on his stomach, and fallen asleep in the middle of it.

When he woke up at dawn or something like that, light anyway, there’d been droves of mice round his feet eating crumbs. He’d yelled out and they’d fled, but he felt so bad that afterward he’d wondered if they were real mice or not and if they were real, could he have seen fifty of them, which was what he thought?

So what with the mice and nothing in the flat but the last of the vodka and six morphine tabs prescribed for his stepfather’s ex-wife’s cancer, he had to go upstairs and see Carl. The way he saw it he didn’t have a choice. For once, the lift was working. If it hadn’t been
he reckoned he’d have lain down on the floor and died. His mother’s nan, who was ninety-five, sang a song that went,

It wasn’t a brewery he wanted, more like a chemistry lab, but the songwriter had the right idea. He growled the tune, going up in the lift, but had to stop because he was shrieking. Carl and Leo lived on the seventh floor. Carl had painted the front door quite a nice shade of yellow but someone had tried to break in, and though they hadn’t succeeded they’d gouged a great slash out of the woodwork from the keyhole to the letter box.

A long time passed before the door was answered. Carl came at last. He looked Hob up and down. “I thought I told you not to come here.”

“I’m in a state,” Hob said.

“My home base is out of bounds, Hob,” Carl said. “You know that.”

“I’m in a state. I just want one rock to see me through the weekend.” He pushed past Carl into the flat. “I got to have it, you know me.”

“One rock wouldn’t see you through a revolving door,” said Carl sadly. “Say hello to Leo. He’s not feeling too good.”

“Him and me both. Hi. I got to have it, Carl, don’t fuck me over.”

Leo was lying on the sofa. He didn’t look any worse than usual, or not in Hob’s opinion. When Hob was in a state he hadn’t much time for other people’s ailments. Leo was reading a letter. He looked terrible when he laughed, his face more like a skull than usual.

“Now you’re here you’d better sit down. Turn your visit into a social call, right? How about a cup of tea?”

Hob shook his head feebly. Sitting down in the brothers’ flat, he could sometimes convince himself he was in a kindly rehab center. There was carpet on the floor and armchairs and if the rest of the furniture was of a slightly lower standard than the kind you see exposed for sale on the pavements of Kilburn High Road, it was furniture and it gave some semblance of home to the place. Carl kept it warm, too, for Leo’s sake. Last year, just before Leo came home from the hospital, Carl had made an attempt to paint this room but had abandoned the task halfway through, so that two of the walls were green, one white, and one half green and half white.

Hob’s mum, who’d known Leo all his life, said Carl was more like a father to him than a brother, thought the world of him, worshiped the ground he walked on, which wasn’t much like Hob’s experience of the paternal role. And Carl didn’t have a very tender heart where others were concerned. Now he had Hob seated in a chair with a mug of tea in front of him, he was back conversing with Leo as if there wasn’t anyone else there.

Hob didn’t know who this woman was they were talking about and cared less. The tea tasted like mice piss, anyway. The woman had written to Leo, it sounded like, she was halfway to being his girlfriend, which was crazy on account of everyone knew Leo was on his way out. Carl wasn’t going to talk about it in front of him anyway; Hob might be in a state but he didn’t miss that tiny shake of the head Carl gave Leo. Maybe he’d mouthed something about walls having ears, only Hob couldn’t see. His voice came out in a whine.

“I got to have something, Carl.”

“The fountain then, the old drinking fountain. Ten. When it’s dark. If it’s not me it’ll be Gupta.”

“You not got nothing now? No shit?”

Carl said remotely, “Absolutely no shit, Hob, in all senses of the word.”

“A couple of E’s? Some cycles?”

“You’re the expert, Hob. I don’t even know what cycles are, but I bet they’re on the controlled list.”

“Some jellies?” Hob said hopefully.

“You’re too scared of the needle, you know that,” said Carl. “It’s time I took payment in kind again, I think.” He took the letter from Leo. “Nice handwriting she’s got.”

“She’s got nice things to say.”

Carl laughed. He put the letter in his pocket. “I’ve never done a violent act,” he said conversationally. “Never drawn a drop of blood or caused a moment’s pain in anger. The pain I caused gave infinite pleasure. How does it feel, Hob, doing what you do?”

“I don’t know,” said Hob. “I’m in a state. I’m fucked.”

“I’ll have a job for you one of these days. How would you like that, Hob? A job that was big enough to keep you in rocks or that elephant dope for the rest of your life?”

Hob said with as much eagerness as he could muster, “Have you got a job for me, Carl? I don’t mind work, I’ll work all the hours God gave.”

Carl started laughing. “I bet you will. You’re a scream, did you know that? You know that old dog man, the one in the baseball cap that walks the dogs?”