A Traitor to Memory (95 page)

And because of all that, he had dreams himself. Not plans as she had, not something spoken, but something held on to like a feather that will soil and be useless for flight if grasped too tightly or for too long.

He wouldn't move quickly, he'd told himself. They were both young. She had her schooling ahead of her and he wanted to establish himself in the City before taking on the sort of responsibilities that came with marriage. But when the time was right … Yes, she was the one. So completely different, so completely capable of
becoming
, so eager to learn, so willing—no, so
desperate
—to escape who she'd been in order to achieve who she believed she could become. She was, in effect, his female counterpart. She didn't know that yet and she never would if he had his way, but in the unlikely event that she discovered that fact, she was a woman who would understand. We all have our hot air balloons, he would tell her.

Had he loved her? he wondered. Or had he merely seen in her his best chance for a life where her foreign background would cast a useful shadow in which he could hide? He didn't know. He'd never got a chance to find out. And at a distance of two decades, he still didn't know how it might have worked out between the two of them. But what he did know without a single doubt was that at long last he'd had enough.

With the Boxter in his possession, he began the drive that he knew was a journey long in coming. It took him across London, first dropping down out of Hampstead and veering in the direction of Regent's Park, then wending his way eastward, ever eastward, to arrive in that Hades of postal codes: E3, where his nightmares had their roots.

Unlike many areas of London, Tower Hamlets had not become gentrified. Films made here did not feature actors who batted their eyelashes, fell in love, lived arty lives, and lent an air of genteel down-at-heel glamour to the place, thus resulting in its renaissance at the hands of yuppies in Range Rovers yearning to be trendy. For the word
renaissance
implied that a place had once seen better times to which an infusion of cash would return it. But to Pitchley's eyes,
Tower Hamlets had been a dump from the moment its first building had its initial foundation stone set into place.

He'd spent more than half his life trying to scrub the grime of Tower Hamlets from beneath his fingernails. He'd worked jobs not fit for man or beast since his ninth birthday, squirreling away whatever he could towards a future he wanted but couldn't quite define. He'd endured bullying at a school where learning took a distant seventh place to tormenting teachers, demolishing ancient and nearly useless equipment, graffitiing every available inch, shagging birds on the stairwells, setting fires in the dustbins, and pinching everything from the third-formers' sweets money to the Christmas collection taken each year to give a decent meal to the area's homeless drunks. In that environment, he'd forced himself to learn, a sponge for
whatever
might get him out of the inferno he'd come to assume was his punishment for a transgression he'd committed in a previous lifetime.

His family didn't understand his passion to be free of the place. So his mother—unmarried as she always had been and would be to her grave—smoked her fags all day at the window of the council flat, collected the dole like it was owed to her for doing the nation the favour of breathing, raised the six offspring that were got by four fathers, and wondered aloud how she'd managed to produce such a git as Jimmy, all neat and tidy like he actually thought he was something other than a yobbo in disguise.

“Lookit '
im
, will you?” she'd ask his siblings. “Too good for us, our Jim. What's it to be today, laddie?”—as she looked him over—“Riding to the 'ounds, are we?”

He'd say, “Aw, Mum,” and feel misery climbing from his navel up his chest and into his jaws.

“Tha's all right, lad,” she'd reply. “Just pinch one of them nice doggies so we'll 'ave a watcher round these ol' digs, okay? Tha'd be nice, now, woul'n't it, kids? 'Ow'd you like our Jimmy to pinch us a dog?”

“Mum, I'm not going fox hunting,” he'd say.

And they'd laugh. Laugh and laugh till he wanted to thrash the lot of them for being so useless.

His mother was the worst because she set the tone. She might have been clever. She might have been energetic. She might have been capable of doing something with her life. But she got herself a baby—Jimmy himself—when she was fifteen and that's when she learned that if she kept having them, she'd be paid. Child Benefit was what they called it. What Jimmy Pytches called it was Chains.

So he made his life's purpose the demolition of his past, taking every odd job he could get his mitts on as soon as he was able to do so. What the job was didn't matter to him: cleaning windows, scrubbing floors, vacuuming carpets, walking dogs, washing cars, minding children. He didn't care. If he was paid to do it, do it he would. Because although money couldn't buy him better blood, it could get him miles from the blood that threatened to drown him.

Then came that cot death, that god-awful moment when he went into her bedroom because it was long past the time she generally woke up from her nap. And there she was like a plastic doll, with one hand curled to her mouth like she'd been trying to help herself
breathe
—for God's sake—and her tiny fingernails were blue were blue were bluest of blue and he knew right then that she was a goner. Crikey, he'd been in the sitting room, hadn't he? He'd been right next door. He'd been watching Arsenal. He'd been thinking, Lucky day, this is, the brat's well away and I won't have to fuss with her during the game. He'd
thought
that—the brat—but he didn't mean it, never would have said it, actually smiled when he saw her in her push chair at the local grocery with her mum. He never thought “the brat” then. Just, Here's lit'le Sherry and her mum. Hello, Nubkins. Because that's what he called her. He called her a nonsense name. Nubkins.

Then she was dead and the police were there. Questions and answers and tears all round. And what kind of monster was
he
who watched Arsenal while a baby was dying and who even to this
day
remembered the score?

There were whispers, of course. There were rumours. Both fueled his passion to be gone forever. And forever was what he thought he'd achieved, a kind of eternal paradise defined by a Dutch-fronted house in Kensington, the kind of house so grand it had a medallion carved 1879 on its gable. And this house was peopled as grandly as it was situated, much to his delight. A war hero, a child prodigy, a for-God's-sake
governess
for that child, a foreign nanny … Nothing could have been more different to where he'd come from: Tower Hamlets via a bed-sit in Hammersmith and a fortune spent on learning everything from how to say
haricots verts
and knowing what it meant to how to use cutlery instead of one's fingers for moving bits of food round one's plate. So when he'd finally reached Kensington Square, no one knew. Least of all Katja, who would never have known, having not had a lifetime of instruction on what it meant to say
lounge
at an inopportune time.

And then she'd got pregnant, the worst sort of getting pregnant.
Unlike his mum, who'd carried on during her pregnancies as if growing a child inside her body were nothing more than a minor inconvenience causing her to switch to a different set of clothes for a few months, Katja'd had no easy time of it, which made her condition impossible to hide. And from that pregnancy had risen everything else, including his own past, threatening to seep from the splitting pipes of their life in Kensington Square like the sewage it was.

Even after all that, he'd thought he could escape it again. James Pitchford, whose past had hung over him like Damocles' sword, just waiting to be smeared across the tabloids as Lodger Once Investigated in Cot Death, just waiting to be revealed as Jimmy Pytches: all aitches dropped and tee-aitches said as effs, Jimmy Pytches the subject of laughter for trying to be better than he was. So he changed again, morphed himself into J. W. Pitchley, ace investor and financial wizard, but running, always running, and always to run.

Which brought him to Tower Hamlets now: a man who'd come to accept the fact that to escape what he could not bear to face, he could kill himself, he could change his identity yet another time, or he could flee forever, not only the teeming city of London but everything that London—and England—represented.

He parked the Boxter near the tower block that had been his childhood home. He looked round and saw that little had changed, including the presence of local skinheads, three of them this time, who smoked in the doorway of a nearby shop, watching him and his car with studied attention. He called out to them, “Want to make ten quid?”

One of them spat a gob of yellowish sputum into the street. “Each?” he said.

“All right. Each.”

“What's to do, then?”

“Keep an eye on the motor for me. See that no one touches it. Okay?”

They shrugged. Pitchley took this for assent. He nodded at them, saying, “Ten now, twenty later.”

“Give,” said their leader, and he slouched over for the cash.

As he handed the ten-pound note over to the thug, Pitchley realised the bloke might well be his youngest half brother, Paul. It had been more than twenty years since he'd seen little Paulie. What an irony it would be if he were handing over what went for extorted dosh to his own brother without either of them knowing who the other was. But that was the case for most of his siblings now. For all he
knew, there might even be more of them than the five there were when he did his runner.

He entered the tower block estate: a patch of dead lawn, chalk hopscotch squares drawn drunkenly on the uneven tarmac, a deflated football with a knife gouge in it, two shopping trolleys overturned and rendered wheel-less. Three little girls were attempting to inline skate on one of the concrete paths, but its condition was as bad as the tarmac's, so they'd get about two and a half yards of even ground to glide on before they had to clomp over or around a spot where the concrete looked as if the bomb squad might want to come to have a look for a UXB.

Pitchley made his way to the tower block's lift and found that it was out of service. A block-lettered sign informed him of this, hanging on old chrome doors long ago decorated by the resident spray-paint artists.

He set off up the stairs, seven flights of them. She loved—as she said—“'aving me a bit of a view.” This was important since she never did anything but stand, sit, lounge, smoke, drink, eat, or watch telly in that sagging-seat chair that had stood forever next to the window.

He was out of breath by the second floor. He had to pause on the landing and breathe deeply of its urine-scented air before climbing upwards. When he got to the fifth floor, he stopped again. By the seventh, his armpits were dripping.

He rubbed down his neck as he walked to the door of her flat. He never suffered a moment's doubt that she would be there. Jen Pytches would move her arse only if the building were going up in flames. And even then she'd complain about it: “Wha' abou' me programme on the telly?”

He rapped on the door. From within he heard the sound of chatter, television voices that marked the time of day. Chat shows in the morning, afternoon and it was snooker—God only knew why—and evening brought the soaps.

No answer to his knock, so Pitchley rapped again, louder this time, and he called out, “Mum?” He tried the door and found it unlocked. He opened it a crack and said, “Mum?” another time.

She said, “Who's it, then? That you, Paulie? You been to the job centre already, 'ave you? Don' think so, lad. Don' be trying to pull the wool over, you go' tha’, son? I wasn' born this morning.” She coughed the deep, phlegm-cursed cough of the forty-year smoker as Pitchley used the tips of his fingers to move the door inward.

He slipped inside and faced his mother. It was the first time he'd seen her in twenty-five years.

“Well,” she said. She was by the window as he thought she would be, but no longer the woman he remembered from his childhood. Twenty-five years of not stirring a muscle unless forced to do so had made his mother into a great mound of a woman wearing stretchy trousers and a jumper the size of a parachute. He wouldn't have known her at all had he passed her on the street. He wouldn't have known her now had she not said, “Jim. Wha's a dolly to make of this sor' 'f surprise?”

He said, “Hello, Mum,” and he looked round the flat. Nothing had changed. Here was the same U-shaped blue sofa, there were the lamps with the misshapen shades, up on the walls were the same set of pictures: each little Pytches sitting on the knee of his or her own dad on the only occasion Jen had managed to make any of them act like fathers. God, seeing them brought it back in a rush: the risible exercise of all the kids lined up and Jen pointing to the pictures, saying, “Here's
your
dad, Jim. He was called Trev. But I called him my little fancy boy.” And, “Yours was Derek, Bonnie. Look at the neck on that bloke, will you, dear? Couldn't put me 'ands
anywhere
near round his neck. Oooh. Wha' a man your dad was, Bon.” And on down the line, the same recitation, given once a week lest any of them forget.

“Wha' you want, then, Jim?” his mother asked him. She gave a grunt as she reached for the telly's remote. She squinted at the screen, made some sort of mental note about what it was she was watching, and pushed the button to mute the sound.

“I'm off,” he said. “I wanted you to know.”

She kept her gaze level on him and said, “You
been
off, lad. How many years? So wha's this off that's different from that?”

“Australia,” he said. “New Zealand. Canada. I don't know yet. But I wanted to tell you I'm making it permanent. Cashing in everything. Starting over. I wanted you to know so you could tell the others.”

“Don' think they been losing sleep wondering where you wanked off to,” his mother said.

“I know. But all the same …” He wondered how much his mother knew. As far as he could recall, she didn't read a newspaper. The nation might go to hell in a wicker basket—politicians on the take, the Royals stepping down, the Lords taking up weapons to fight off the Commons' plans for their demise, sport figures dying, rock stars taking overdoses of designer drugs, trains crashing, bombs exploding
in Piccadilly—and none of it mattered or had ever mattered, so she wouldn't know what had happened to one James Pitchford and what had been done to stop more from happening.