Rattling the Bones (3 page)

In Camden Town Market space is at a premium and visibility down to only the immediate few feet ahead and the stalls to either side. They effectively cut out the light. It is a maze of shadowy narrow alleys between packed merchandise, browsers, tourists and genuine shoppers. He had already vanished among the crowded stalls. I plunged after him although a sinking feeling told me I was probably wasting my time.

Obstinately I pushed on, stallholders’ cries ringing in my ears, people jostling me in their efforts to reach the goods. Loitering teenagers gathered before a jewellery stand blocked my way as they discussed the merits of strings of brightly coloured beads. Ahead of them I glimpsed a white baseball cap. There he was!

I thrust the teenagers aside ignoring the glare of the stallholder and the girls’ indignant protests. Brightly-coloured clothing exotic with sequins and glitter dangled from racks and swayed into my face bringing with it the acrid and musty smell of the dyes. Between the racks, from time to time, I glimpsed my quarry or thought I did. A flash of white baseball cap, was that him? Or was it someone else? To anyone watching from above our chase might have appeared as one of those computer games where one character pursues another through a maze strewn with dead ends, obstacles and booby traps. Then he was gone.

I had been so long in pursuit, sticking to the trail despite all my quarry’s tricks, that at first I would not believe I had really lost him. The realisation that he had shaken me off struck me like a painful blow. I scurried round a few corners, scanned the alleys in vain for a gangling white figure or a baseball cap. People pushed past me. Music rang tinnily in my ears and chatter in half a dozen languages. But I was alone.

I guessed what he might have done. Probably he had snatched off the tell-tale cap. He had ducked down and cut through the middle of one of the clothing stalls, squeezing between the tightly packed racks out into the parallel alley beyond. He was probably already back in the High Street.

I retraced my steps there although I knew it was useless. I looked up and down it in both directions but there was no telling which way he had gone. Perhaps even back to the Underground station and even now he stood on some platform way beneath my feet. He knew his terrain and had used it well to outwit me. But it is my terrain too, and I was furious with myself for allowing him to do it.

In a teeming metropolis you meet and part from people all the time. Lives touch briefly and then, like the proverbial ships in the night, pass and in almost no time at all any sign of that brief interaction has been wiped away traceless. But I’d always remembered Edna and wondered what became of her. She was part of my first foray into detection, even providing me with a clue, and I felt an obligation towards her. So as I stood there, panting, perspiring and hopping mad, I thought, Next time I’ll be ready! I’ll be looking out for you, chum, and I’ll know you! Edna knew you, too . . . and she was scared.

I’d have been scared, too, if I’d had any sense. But like I was telling you, bad situations draw me fatally towards them.

Chapter Two

The unexpected meeting with Edna had reminded me of what I had so recently left behind. I’ve travelled very little in a spatial sense, hardly ever leaving London.That in itself, I suppose, is a bit odd these days. But on the other hand I have done quite a bit of spiritual travelling as I’ve drifted from reasonable normality (if the patched together world of Grandma and Dad could have been considered that) into homelessness and back again.

For most ‘normal’ people the world of the homeless and kinless is a foreign land yet they only have to step out of their front doors to spot its inhabitants. If they wanted to see them, that is, and most people choose not to. They throw a cloak of invisibility over them and hurry on by.

This curiously distorted ‘other’ world follows a weird logic. It operates by its own rules, sets out its own patterns and sometimes even keeps its own clock. Whole communities grow up and thrive in derelict properties with eviction hanging over them like the sword of Damocles, impermanence a way of life. Those who really have nowhere else to lay their heads but the street often choose to sleep by day when the thoroughfare is full of busy unheeding passers-by and pollution-spilling traffic. At night, when myriad dangers emerge from the shadows or spill from clubs and bars in drunken hostility onto damp flagstones glistening in the lamplight, the homeless prowl the streets in constant watchful wakefulness.

People in the ‘normal’ world should never kid themselves that it isn’t easy to slip through the porous boundaries into the world of the dispossessed. Sometimes, if you are very lucky or exceptionally determined, you can make the journey in the other direction and re-enter the lost Eden of acceptable existence, moving from rootlessness to a kind of security, however tenuous. I am one of those fortunate to have made that perilous transition. I’m never unaware of my good luck. I’ve never forgotten those who haven’t shared it.

‘I always wondered about Edna,’ I said to Ganesh that evening. ‘You know, where she came from, why she was living in that churchyard.’

‘Did you?’ replied Ganesh, turning up his jacket collar against the stiff breeze whistling along the Chalk Farm Road. The wind wasn’t cold, if anything it was warm and the air muggy, but it carried on it a cloud of dust and small pieces of debris that whirled around us like an urban sandstorm.

‘Yes, didn’t you?’

‘No,’ said Ganesh.

‘Come on, Gan, you must have done.’

‘You might not have noticed,’ said Ganesh huffily, ‘but back in the Rotherhithe days I spent my entire time selling spuds and onions for my dad. Just like now I spend my life running round on my Uncle Hari’s behalf. Am I appreciated? Am I, heck!’

I recognised the signs of a family dispute hovering in the background. ‘You’ve quarrelled with Hari,’ I said.

‘You can’t quarrel with my uncle,’ said Ganesh with scarcely suppressed fury. ‘It’s impossible. To quarrel with a person you have to get some reaction out of them, right? They listen to you and then they yell at you. You listen to them and you yell at them, right? That’s quarrelling.’

‘OK,’ I said doubtfully.

‘But I can’t quarrel with Hari because he
never listens in the first place
!’ Ganesh’s voice rose to a shout. ‘I put my point of view, politely. He ignores it. I repeat it. He says, why am I standing there chattering when there’s work to be done? I ask, again very politely, can I have a little of his attention to discuss something? Oh, he is far too busy. Speak to him later, when the shop’s closed. Only, later, when we’re upstairs in the flat, it’s something else he’s got to take care of.’

‘What’s the problem?’ I asked sympathetically.

Ganesh stopped in his tracks and wheeled round to face me. ‘What’s the problem? You’re as bad as Hari. Isn’t what I’ve been describing problem enough?’

‘Yes, what I meant was, what is the problem you want to discuss with him and he won’t discuss?’

‘You wouldn’t understand. It’s a family matter,’ said Ganesh stiffly.

‘You know,’ I told him, ‘you won’t like me saying this but in your own way, you’re just like Hari.’

At this, Ganesh fell into a prolonged offended silence until we reached Potato Heaven.

All right, I know. It’s an awful name and both Gan and I tried to talk Jimmie out of it but without luck. Jimmie said it would attract the punters and perhaps he was right, because it was always busy these days and Jimmie was generally wreathed in smiles instead of cigarette smoke. He still puffed away doggedly but at least he managed now to keep the fumes out of the eating area.

When we first knew Reekie Jimmie, as he was affectionately known to all, he ran a baked spud café which made not the slightest concession to customer preferences, pleasant décor, healthy eating or anything else. Then Jimmie decided to go upmarket and went into business with an Italian guy and opened a snazzy pizza parlour. I worked there for a while as a waitress (while rehearsing for a role in a never-to-be-forgotten production of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
.) There had been just a little problem with the pizza place and the law. But the cops decided Jimmie had been a hapless dupe, he just wasn’t bright enough for crime, and allowed him to go back to his first love: potatoes.

‘You know where you are with tatties, right, hen?’ he explained to me.

But just as living in a hostel had done something for Edna, running the pizza parlour had done something for Jimmie. He had acquired Style. He’d realised that surroundings do matter. So he’d kept on the pizza restaurant premises, complete with the beautiful tiled picture of Vesuvius on the wall, but gone back to spuds, only now they came with Bolognese filling (mince) and Milanese (ham) and one called Four Cheeses (mousetrap). See what I mean?

When Ganesh and I were settled in a corner with our potatoes, Bolognese for me and Four Cheeses for Ganesh because he’s vegetarian, I returned to the subject of Edna. It seemed safer than trying to talk to Gan about his problems with his uncle. Anyway, Edna was what I wanted to talk about.

‘She was really scared when she saw the young guy watching her,’ I said. I’d told him all about it, even how the watcher had given me the slip.

‘How can you tell?’ asked Ganesh frowning. He wasn’t frowning at anything I’d said but because long rubbery strings of cheese dangled from his fork and he couldn’t break them. The more he twiddled the fork, trying to wrap them round the tines, the longer and thinner the strings became. He picked up his knife and chopped at them but they flattened beneath the blade.

‘What is this stuff?’ he demanded in exasperation.

At that moment the strings of cheese parted and he managed to get them into a manageable forkful.

‘How can you tell how Edna’s feeling?’ he went on when he’d swallowed it with an expression of distaste. ‘She’s not like other people. Her expressions aren’t like other people’s. She never liked strangers. She didn’t like having you stop her in the street. I expect just the crowd round her spooked her.’

‘It was him,’ I said firmly. ‘He frightened her. If he was innocent, why did he run?’

‘He didn’t actually run, you said.’ Ganesh can be annoyingly pedantic.

‘So he walked very fast! He deliberately gave me the slip. He did it very professionally, too. He’s done it a few times, I reckon, given people the slip. He knew exactly what to do.’

‘If I didn’t know you and you were obviously following me,
I’d
give you the slip,’ argued Ganesh. ‘That’s your trouble, see? You’re always so set on doing just what you want - and generally that means the first thing to come into your head - that you never stop to consider how it looks to other people. I know you. I accept that you act like a lunatic sometimes. I don’t like it but I’ve learned to live with it. Other people just think you’re weird.’ He abandoned the cheese which had set like plastic now it had cooled, and stared at me thoughtfully. ‘Especially,’ he said, ‘with that funny-coloured hair.’

I was feeling sensitive about my hair at that moment and I thought it tactless of him to mention it. The rest of what he’d said I generally went along with. I am aware other people sometimes find me strange. But the way I see it, that’s their problem. The hair colour was mine.

‘The label on the box said the rinse was dark auburn,’ I defended myself feebly.

‘That,’ said Ganesh, jabbing his fork at me, ‘isn’t dark auburn. It’s crimson.You look like your head’s on fire.’

‘OK, I’ll buy another rinse and do something about it. Only I can’t do anything about it now, can I? What about Edna?’

‘What about her?’

‘Gan!’ I couldn’t help my voice rising. ‘What are we going to
do
?’

‘Nothing. Especially “we” are going to do nothing. I have no problem with any of this. It’s your overactive imagination and that drama training you had. Everything’s a big production with you. Everything is villains and plots and dark deeds and you, of course, cast as the heroine putting all that right.’

I was opening my mouth and trying to get a word of protest in but he wouldn’t let me and steamrollered on.

‘
You
don’t know anything’s wrong.
You
thought she looked frightened but with Edna that might mean anything.
You
thought the guy over the road was watching. All right, then, perhaps he was. It’s not illegal. It’s not even odd. When I’m waiting about for you I watch people going past. The guy was hanging about for whatever reason and watching you talk to a bag lady was probably as interesting as anything else, beats staring into space.’

‘But - but - but . . .’ from me, in vain.

Ganesh, who would have done well on a drama course himself even though he would have been inclined to nineteenth-century melodrama, raised a hand like an old-time traffic cop. ‘Then,
then
you chose to chase after him and he decided reasonably enough to shake you off. What is
more
. . .’