How I Left the National Grid (17 page)

13

Sam opened the laptop in the bedroom. With Elsa’s phone seemingly still off, he felt desperate for anything to distract him. She’d never been out of contact for so long, he thought. How would she would be able to resist coming home? She had been so feverishly excited about the house. Given it was her pride and joy it had felt wrong to text her about the smashed window. Sam wondered if she was staying away to give him the chance to make the place pleasant and welcoming for her return.

Somehow, he was comforted by the familiar rubric of Google’s homepage. Like a family photograph, portraying the less significant members.

Amongst the new emails there was only one relating to The National Grid. It was from a Nataly Callis.

Dear Sam. It was interesting to be able to put a face to a name. Unlike some other National Grid fans, I wanted to offer my support towards your book. Perhaps I shouldn’t class myself as a fan. I think Robert would agree that I’ve always been more than that. I knew Robert very well during the band days. I have some information that you need. There’s things that urgently need to be said before this situation escalates further. Could you come to my home in Brighton to talk? Nataly Callis

He replied in the affirmative, offering to come straight to hers. I’ll pack, and then plan until Elsa calls, he thought.

Sam was surprised how many interview cassettes were gathered in the car. He emptied them from his bag, and stacked them in a neat pile on the desk. They looked shabby and adolescent, next to Elise’s pristine postcards of Paris.

He took his shoes off and lay on the bed. Then closed his eyes and tried to order questions in his head.

He was awoken in the morning by the sound of the air conditioning. Throughout the night it had been working overtime, trying to warm the house given the heat leaking out of the smashed window.

He checked the phone on Elsa’s pillow, hoping he had slept through a phone call. But the phone sat mute, blinking. He hated the feeling that came with having an arc of hope completed. She was in Northumberland, not Ethiopia. He wondered if he should call again. Would her phone show up all ten missed calls?

Nataly had replied in the night, offering to speak to him as soon as he could make it, and giving her address. He remembered the street she listed from his trips to indie clubs as a student. He was sure her house overlooked the sea, but somehow Sam couldn’t imagine that pale, delicate woman amongst Brighton’s vivid colours.

He threw his notepad, mobile and pen into a bag and made his way into the kitchen. Sunlight was blasting over the communal patio visible through the back windows.

As he poured himself a glass of orange juice, he could hear on the patio some young families making their rambunctious way onto it, enjoying the early morning sun. A young girl was being held aloft by her father, who smiled from behind designer shades. Sam was surprised to see families joining together so early in the day, but the elegant plaza had been designed to offer some communal room. It was protected by a high wall at the back of it, and Sam realized there would be few such places around. He could hear clattering from the front of the house too; no doubt he was being hemmed in on all sides by other people’s happiness.

He drained the glass, before rushing outside.

But the moment he unshackled the bolt at the front of the yard he was surprised to see his car window open. He forced his bag through the gap, onto the passenger seat. It was only then that he realized the clattering at the front hadn’t been a family, perhaps
going down the path between the houses to the patio. The door to the neighbouring front yard had been kicked open. Sam knew he’d bolted his gate shut as he’d made his way in, but theirs had clearly looked looser. Someone had kicked it wide open, pulling off the area around the lock. The door swung ominously in the wind, exposing the still sleeping house. They have kids, Sam thought. Someone has broken in during the night.

He crept closer. He could see no sign that someone had forced entry through their front door. But if the intruder hadn’t made his way into their house then that left only one alternative. They had either scaled the wall into the path, which would led only to the closed-off plaza at the back, or they had leapt over the walls between each house and got into Sam’s front yard when his back was turned.

Sam rushed back to the house. The upper window to the front living room was flapping, banging in the wind with a force that Sam knew would have awoken him in the night.

Someone was in his house.

He threw his body against the front door and darted inside.

Nothing.

Sam cursed himself for leaving the phone on the upstairs bed, and his mobile in the car. Should he wedge the front door open, to have an escape route? Or trap himself inside with the intruder?

He pulled the door shut behind him. ‘Who’s there?’ he shouted.

An instant clatter in the kitchen.

‘What the hell do you want?’ he shouted. He grabbed Elsa’s statuette from the hallway table, and edged towards the kitchen. Sam caught a glimpse of a figure flashing across the kitchen doorway, to behind the door.

Blood pounded in his veins, all the frustration welling up. ‘I’m calling the police,’ he shouted. ‘Get out of here now, or you’ll get battered.’

His threat lacked a note of resolve. He knew it. The kitchen
door slammed shut with a deafening bang. Sam gripped the statuette. Should he fight him or run? Fight or run?

The intruder made the decision for him. A roar of shattering glass filled the air. He was breaking every pane of glass in the kitchen.

The sound of children screaming filled the air. Sam could picture the families out the back, the young ones terrified. Shards thrown onto their bodies.

He dropped the statuette and ran. He slipped on the carpet, his heart in his mouth as he heard the kitchen door open. A shadow fell over Sam. The distinct shape of a man with a baseball bat.

Sam scrambled to his knees.

The front door seemed miles away. He surged towards it, footsteps pounding closer to him. He grabbed the handle, tore the door open and then pushed it behind him, against a solid human form. Sam caught a glimpse of a black boot as the body crumpled behind the door. He slammed the door shut. ‘You’re fucking dead, Sam,’ shouted a gruff voice.

Sam ran to the car. His fingers fumbled through his pockets for the key. For a moment he forgot where the button was, smearing his fingers all over the key until it unlocked with a flash.

He glanced back. The front door began to open. Sam charged into the car, pushed the key into the ignition, and turned it. As the car squealed down the road he looked in the rear mirror, expecting to see the intruder run out. But no one was there. It was like he’d experienced a poltergeist.

As Sam pulled into a layby he thanked God that Elsa had picked up the phone this time. She had seemed almost too shocked to even agree to stay away, her voice trembling.

The policeman had been helpful. It had sounded as if he’d been eating until Sam told him that there was an intruder in his house.

‘Are you in there with him?’ he’d asked, the exchange slowing when Sam revealed he was speeding away in his car, to the station.

He’d been there for two hours, giving evidence in a sparse room for a DCI Beckett, a heavy-set man with rings under his eyes. Beckett constantly nodded as he wrote, before the two policewomen who’d visited the house returned and took over. One seemed more in charge, a pale woman with a set, almost plastic face and a hard set of curls. ‘It looks like nothing was stolen, but some papers were spread out on the floor.’

My notes on the interviews, Sam thought.

‘Probably someone chancing their arm, seeing if the new owners would be rich pickings,’ Beckett said.

‘Is there any reason someone would want to attack you?’ he asked, before Sam described the situation. ‘The National Grid,’ the police officer muttered, as he scratched out notes. ‘I used to like them.’

Even knowing the man had left, Sam delayed his return to the house. It greeted him with the same, hollow hum as he edged down the hallway. Except this time it had a demented edge to it.

Every glass panel in the kitchen had been smashed. The patio was deserted, plates and cups abandoned, covered with leftovers.

This is it, he thought. The end.

Sam frantically tore panels of cardboard from the box by the bin and tried to patch the windows up. When he sensed neighbours watching him he ran upstairs to check that nothing had been stolen. His shoulders dropped when he saw that his laptop, and Elsa’s jewellery were still there. He circled the bedroom for a while, pushing his hand through his hair and cursing, before calling the glazier. He knew it was stupid to leave the house unsecured but he couldn’t be expected to stay here now, he thought. Not with the intruder at large, and clearly after him.

14

Sam felt ridiculous driving to meet Nataly, through the drizzle and occasional bursts of violent rain, given the situation he was leaving in his wake. But she had offered answers, after all. Given how insane his life had become he was starting to grimly, determinedly, crave them.

The tall, solemn house she had given as an address looked empty. It was whitewashed, with a turret at one corner. Sam noticed through the window very few decorations in her living room as he knocked.

He heard a response inside the house, and felt himself tense.

Nataly seemed thinner than he’d remembered, the aquiline profile more pronounced in this clear ocean air. She smiled faintly in greeting, with lips the colour of dried blood. For a moment he was reluctant to go inside. The bags under the eyes and the mouth that drooped downwards even when smiling unnerved him. As he stepped over the threshold Sam saw that she was wearing an oversized white shirt, the top button done up. It faintly resembled a cassock.

‘I had some trouble finding your house,’ Sam started.

‘I don’t like to make myself too accessible.’ He noticed how readily her body hunched.

The hallway was dimly lit. There was a vast print of the cover of The National Grid’s album on the wall.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked, in a small voice.

He nodded.

‘I think it’s the most important thing I own. Let’s sit in here,’ she said.

Sam was directed into the front living room that overlooked the sea. A large white cube that reminded him of an Edward Hopper painting. There were photos on the wall, blurred shots from The National Grid’s first tour. I was on that tour, he
thought. But I don’t remember her.

‘You mentioned that you knew Robert, that you might be able to help me find him. Judging from the lack of clutter I’d presume he’s not a housemate then?’

‘Not any more.’

He was unable to believe how casually she made the remark. People had been speculating Wardner’s every movement for years and yet she seemed so matter-of-fact. His fingers fumbled to roll the tape in his jacket pocket.

‘When did you live with him? Can you shed any light on where he’s been for twenty five years?’

‘Yes. First, I should get you a drink.’

Nataly turned in the doorway.

‘A cup of tea, please,’ he said, too loud. His voice echoed with a glacial reverberation. This home isn’t used to volume, Sam thought. It’s used to reflection. Picking over the graveyard of the past. Turning over stones in it, which should be left to rot.

He barely had time to take in the pictures on the wall, each blurred and evocative, before she returned. She gently handed him the drink.

‘He was like a mentor to me,’ she said.

‘Did Robert take the pictures on the wall?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘When did he give them to you?’

‘He posted them to me gradually, over the course of the last twenty five years.’

‘After he vanished?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you see him during that time?’

‘No. But they weren’t all he sent me.’

‘Perhaps we should begin at the start.’ Sam sipped quickly as he sat in a wooden chair opposite her.

‘I wrote to him as a fellow musician,’ she began. ‘We struck up a correspondence and he insisted on coming to see me play live.
I was in a band called Rosary.’

‘You were in Rosary? I owned one of your EPs!’

She looked surprised. As she smoothed her hair he remembered the vibrant, demonstrative singer he had seen pictured in
NME.
With so much more blood and intensity than the wan, spectral vision opposite.

‘I loved your record. It was so…uncompromising.’

She smiled. ‘Yes. That was me. Robert came to live with me the first time he went missing. It wasn’t long before he disappeared for good and even I didn’t know where he was.’

‘Did he explain to you why he wanted to run away?’

‘No. I didn’t ask then, he was too fragile. I think that he needed to get away from all distractions. The fight with his label…and one or two other parts of his life that were not going so well.’

‘Did he come straight to you?’

‘He phoned not long after he went missing. He had been travelling by train. Asked if he could stay.’

‘It was November when he went missing. So around then?’

‘Yes. Winter.’

This is amazing, Sam thought, sitting up. A big piece of the jigsaw has fallen into place. ‘So was he with you for long?’

‘A few months. I tried to keep him there, safe, but after a while he left.’

Sam blew at his tea.

‘What did he do for that whole time?’

‘Very little. At first he was like a damaged bird. I’d built up this private little world in which I’d begun to create, and until then he’d helped me. Given me confidence. But when he moved in it was payback time. I had to drop everything. My work, my art, just to keep him alive. How to get him to change his clothes, eat his meals. I went from barely knowing this guy, idolising him, to practically changing his nappy. Whilst getting better, he took and he took and he took. I didn’t realise how much he’d
taken from me until he left. The intensity of that time, and the way he deserted me after I’d nourished him…it was overpowering. I was spent after that. I found it hard to get back on my feet. Very hard.’