Paradise Tales (18 page)

The woman came and sat next to him. She was smaller, flabbier, with the beginnings of a double chin. “I’m real now,” she said. They watched the trees dance until the four suns had set. All the stars began to sing.

Very suddenly all the boys, none of the girls, just the boys, began to dance in unison, a sort of gloomy square dance. Well, that was just too much for me, I couldn’t make it out at all, I turned to an older woman who looked rather sensible. By older, I mean about thirty-five, and I said to her, “He had a dog. Has anyone seen his dog?”

She tutted. “They would have killed that too.” She said it in the most extraordinary way. I simply could not understand her tone of voice. I think she felt it would have been a botched job if they had not killed the dog.

“You oughtn’t to be allowed out,” she said with a kind of crooked smile. Her intent may even have been kindly, to warn me. But there was a glint about it that I did not like. It is obviously going to be my fate from now on to understand every word that anyone says to me, but not a single sentence. I couldn’t find the dog.

And I couldn’t face the wait on the train platform either. I do hate stepping over sleeping bags, especially when they’re full of person. I indulged and took a taxi.

“Steady, old boy, let me help you in,” said the driver.

“Thank you,” I said, trying to settle myself in, but my coat had twisted itself about me in the most uncomfortable way. “It’s good to know that human beings are not an entirely extinct species.”

He was looking at me in his mirror by now, his face closed up like a shop. I evidently was an old codger.

“There’s just been another one of those killings,” I said. “All these people smirking at the poor boy just as though someone had told a bad joke. Nobody trying to get the poor lad down from where they’d strung him up.”

“Uh,” he said. “Yeah.” Yes. I was a boring old coot, and I was going to go on being boring.

“It’s not decent. There wasn’t a shred of acknowledgment that killing people is wrong.”

The taxi driver shrugged. “Some people think it keeps the streets clear.”

“Well, there’s a lot of old people too. I suppose you’ll be saying they ought to start on us next.”

He roared with laughter. He nodded. I think he agreed.

I got out and watched him drive off, and it was only then that I realized I’d forgotten to get my coffee. Coffee, I’ll have you know, was the whole reason for going to Waterloo in the first place. There used to be a little shop near me that sold coffee, nice young person ran it, rather old-fashioned, you know, dungarees and no makeup. I could talk to her. Now the only place left is near Waterloo, where they sell it to Frenchmen. It’s like going into a sex shop. All nudges and winks and some sort of coffee-fiend argot. And I do resent being held up as some sort of laboratory specimen proving the harmlessness of caffeine.

“There you go,” says the man behind the counter, and points to me. “He’s still with us. Didn’t do him any harm, did it?”

“I drink coffee because I like the taste,” I say, and they all roar with laughter. Well, it’s nice to find yourself a continual source of amusement to others.

I live in fear. I can’t carry groceries, they’re too heavy for me. Not that anyone knows what you mean when you use the word groceries. They send these food kits. You know, yeast tablets, vitamin E capsules. And the persons who deliver them are more terrifying than anything you’ll see around Waterloo. They wear these tribal-mask things over their faces. I asked one of them once if it was something to do with air pollution. His response was to repeat the words “air pollution” several times over, at increasing volume. I think everyone imagines they’re having to shout at people who are wearing headphones.

And I don’t like those Home Help things. How is a computer supposed to know what’s good for you? Bloody fascist health freaks. Always trying to replace a good cuppa with Hibiscus or Rose Hip—they all sound like plump women. I refuse to have my eating habits monitored by a machine. I’ll eat and drink what I like, thank you very much.

I finally succeeded in getting my front door open, and there was my niece and her friend with their boots on my sofa. I can’t say I like the way she drops in and uses my house, but you can’t be an old stick all the time, can you. My niece is called Gertrude and her friend is Brunnhilde. Who gives people these names? They all sound like characters in grand opera.

“Tough time, Grumps?” Gertrude bellows. It’s like trying to hold a conversation in the middle of a rugby pitch.

“You’ll get marks on my sofa,” I tell her.

“Not marks. Bloodstains,” said Brunnhilde going all bug-eyed like a horror movie. Something else they don’t have these days. Both girls are huge, vast, like something out of the first issue of
Superman
, you know, lifting vehicles single handed. I, in the meantime, am getting into a wrestling match with my coat and scarf. My coat and scarf are winning. Even my clothing is insolent these days.

“Here, let me do it for you,” says Gertrude and takes them from me. “Wossa ma-ah, Grumps?” Her speech is interrupted by more glottal stops than a Morris Minor in need of a service.

“I saw another one of those bodies,” I said.

“You weren’t down Wa’ahloo, again, were you?” she said.

“It’s where I get my coffee from,” I said. “Or rather, used to.”

“Coffee,” says Brunnhilde and makes a moue of disgust the size of a bagel. “I’d rather drink paint stripper.”

“Wa’ahloo is where all the dossers hang out, Grumps. Issa bloody wossa butcher shop.”

Brunnhilde is rubbing her thighs in a way that I take to be sarcastic. “Maybe he likes a bit of excitement.”

Gertrude giggles at the idea, and smoothes down my coat. For her, it lies still. I tell you the thing is alive and has it in for me. “Look, Grumps. Do yourself a favour. Stay north of the river. You don’t know where the safe passages are.”

“I refuse to accept that there are parts of this city where I must not walk.”

“You don’t go for a stroll down the middle of the motorway, do you? Come on, sit down.”

I do as I’m told, but I’m still upset. My hands are shaking. They are also lumpy and blue and cold. “Why do they do it?” I say.

“Why do we do it, you mean,” says Gertrude, plumping up a pillow.

“You do it?”

“Well, yeah. We all do it, Grumps. It’s game. There’s too many of them on the streets. If you know what you’re doing, you don’t get hurt. You know. You’re out with your mates, you’re in a gang, you see another gang. You leave each other alone.”

“And go for the defenceless. Well, that is brave of you!”

Brunnhilde explains the rationale for me. “They’re killing themselves with all that booze and fags.” I remembered the yellow tips of that boy’s fingers.

“Then let them do it in peace, you don’t have to help them.”

Oh dear. I’m shocked again. I can’t accept that nice young people on a date will kill someone as part of the evening’s entertainment. In my day, you felt racy if you fell down in the gutter. Stoned was lying on your back upside down and realizing you were trying to crawl across the sky.

“They’re just using up resources,” says Brunnhilde, and she stands up, and starts to case the joint. Her upper lip is working as her tongue runs back and forth over her teeth. It looks as though she has a mouthful of weasels. “You live here all alone, then?” she asks.

“I was married,” I say.

“Nice place. Aren’t you a bit scared living here all alone? With all this stuff?” She is fingering my Yemeni dagger. A souvenir of a very different time and place.

“Some of it must be worth a packet. Don’t you feel unprotected?”

“Yes,” I say. “All the time.”

“Yeah. You could be here all alone and someone come in.” She’s taken the dagger out of its decorated sheath. It’s curved and it gleams. It’s not very sharp. It would hurt.

“In the end, it’s all just things,” I say.

“Oh, can I have some of them, then?” she asks, and giggles. I’m rather pleased to report that I was not frightened, simply aware of what was going on.

“Look at the poor old geezer,” said Brunnhilde. “Using up space. Using up food.” She looked at Gertrude. “Let’s put him out of his misery.”

“Honestly, Brum, you’re such a wanker!” Gertrude said, and threw a pillow at her. “I mean, your idea of sport is to pitch into my old Grumps? Well, you do like a pulse-pounder, don’t you?”

Brunnhilde looked downcast, as though she had failed to be elected Head Girl.

Gertrude was on her feet. “Come on, let’s get you out before Grumps does you some collateral. Honestly. You can be so naff sometimes.”

“All right then!” said Brunnhilde, biting back rather ineffectively. “Social work is not my forte anyway.” She took a final slurp of my fruit juice. As she held the glass, she curled her little finger delicately away from it. Then Gertrude bundled her toward the door.

“See you later, Grumps. I’ll take this wild woman off your hands.”

“I wasn’t frightened, you know.” I said. I wanted her to know that.

“Course not. You’re the hard type that goes to Waterloo.” They both laughed, and the door closed. I heard Gertrude say outside. “S’all right. I’ll get it all when he dies anyway.”

I’m reasonably certain that Gertrude saved my life, but I don’t think she thought that was very important. She did it rather as one might stop someone putting his greasy head on the antimacassars. I am so grateful for small favours.

But at least I understood what was happening.

I miss Amy, of course. I sometimes wonder if things would be any different if we’d had children, grandchildren. They would have turned out like Gertrude, I expect. Strangers, complete strangers, no matter how often I talked to them.

So, I bolted my door, and I went Home.

It is vaguely embarrassing. I expect I smiled to myself, slightly guilty, slightly ashamed, like those people gawking at corpses. Rigging myself up in all the gear, as though I were auditioning for a part in
Terminator II
. Better than the muck they put on these days, it’s all like old Shirley Temple movies to me. I slip on the spectacles and I put on the boots and the gloves, and then I’m off Home.

Village near Witney, Oxfordshire, 1954. Church bells. The elms have not all died of disease, so there are banks of them, huge, high, billowing like clouds and squawking with rookeries. And all the Cotswold stone houses are lined up with thatched roofs and crooked windows in which sit Delft vases, and the Home Service is playing music so sensible it almost smells of toasted white bread. There used to be a country called England. I’m not the one who remembers this, though I was there. My bones remember it.

And I knock on a door and say, “Good morning, Mrs Clavell, is Kimberly there, please?” and then out comes my friend Kim.

Same age as me. We’ve taken recently to looking as we actually are, old fools. Kim has some snow-white hair left and his cheeks are mapped with purple veins. But we’re wearing shorts and we can climb trees. We can climb to the pinnacle of the old ruined abbey, and there is no one guarding it and no one charging admission. No son et lumière for Japanese tourists. And do you know? Hardly even a ritual killing. It’s ours.

Kim moved to California, and became both rich and poor at the same time as is the way in California, always about to make a film. He’s even worse off than I am now, in some home, without another friend in the world, in someone else’s country. But he’s Home now.

We take the short cut, through the fields, past the hall. Here, the safe passages are ours, all the way to the river.