To Indigo Page 3

  The clock on the church chimed. 9 p.m.

  Nothing else was evident.

  Soon I drew the curtains. I put on the hall light and went upstairs and put on the light in my study, which had once been my parents’ bedroom.

  Turning on the computer I checked for emails. There was only one, from Peakes about some stationery.

  All this time I was thinking, What did I see? Was it real?

  I didn’t feel deranged. Nor did I think I had not seen what I had.

  The frivolous idea that after all, and truly, the man from the pub in The Strand might be my character come to life failed to resurface. I don’t believe such things can happen. And if perhaps they ever could, I would never reckon they could happen to a man like myself.

  So it was a mystery. Or perhaps something in the prawns had not been quite right, or the cheese; something as silly as that. I’d heard of such incidents, a mild hallucinatory food-poisoning. But I felt cool and quite steady, not sick, and not sweating now.

  Better let the episode go. Perhaps it would prove useful, if not in revitalizing Untitled, then in my next commercial work. For honestly, now, I had no desire at all to uncork my unpublished novel from the files.

  I did some small chores round the house, had a slice of supermarket cheddar on toast, and watched the news. The world as always was in unremitting chaos, and apparently the temperature in Britain had been an unseasonal twenty – roughly seventy degrees, we would have said in my youth.

  I ran a bath, and afterwards went to bed.

  Like many of my age I don’t sleep as well as I did.

  What an unappreciated pleasure, the sleepful nights of my teens and twenties had been, the odd sleepless one an occasion for fretful wonder. Now they’re a matter of course, and on a ‘good’ night I average five or six non-consecutive hours if I’m lucky.

  But I lay back and watched the darkness and the faint municipal lamplight through the curtains. I put on my bedside radio, Radio 3. They were playing Handel, I thought.

  I considered my next commission, which was a small thriller, one in a series devised by someone else and something for which I had no enthusiasm, but it would help pay bills. I often do a bit of work in my insomniac hours, even get up sometimes at three or four in the morning to push some notes into the computer.

  My brain however kept going back to the pub, and, nastier, the fence.

  At midnight I switched to the news as I habitually do, and listened once more to the rehash of hell on earth.

  What was it all for? What was to be done?

  I used to get angry and have opinions. Now I take it in like a sort of slop. The bloody awful thing is, this rehearsal of horrors usually helps me drift asleep.

  Which was what happened. We were on to the World Service by then, a report on some far off disaster beyond human belief, and I was asleep.

  I dreamed he and I were sitting on a torn-out palm tree drifting on a salt-dark sea, and he said to me, “The thing is, Phippsy, it was written, us meeting as we did.”

  To this hour, this piece of dream-dialogue frightens me. Because he speaks in the dream as he would speak. Not as I would have him speak, at least partly grammatically. Us meeting, not our. And his use of my name, like the bullies at Chaults Grammar School. My father’s, therefore my name is Phipps. Although my professional name is R.P. Phillips. Harris suggested that, while he was dismantling my first book and sending me home to reinvent it. “Phipps – no, old son. Doesn’t have a ring to it. Phelps, I wonder…? No. No – Phillips.”

  In the dream Joseph Traskul was not in his black clothes and bashed boots from the pub. He wore Vilmos’s garments, Vilmos’s loose shirt and broken coat.

  The radio must have said it, three hundred people were dead. Both the dream-Joseph and the dream-I heard this.

  Joseph said to me, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee,” quoting the Book of Job, and also, naturally, Melville’s Moby Dick.

  One gets used to rising early. My almost ten years in the library service had marked this indelibly on my mental clock. Even when I sleep especially badly I rarely get up later than eight.

  I used to have a paper delivered, my father’s habit. I stopped that too a couple of years back. I seem to listen to enough news. The post, which used to arrive at eight or before, seldom now appears much before 11 a.m.

  But today there was an envelope on the mat.

  In the brilliant light of too-early-summer morning I bent to see.

  No 74, said the hand printing on its surface. The writing was erratic, but I still took it for some circular, a charity appeal, Jehovah’s Witness threat, or one of those Householder issues that suggest to us we can sell our house and then rent it back, must be aware of this or that road-widening, pipe-renewing or other potentially destructive plan, or that our government loves us, and we should be en garde.

  I didn’t bother to open it, only carried it through to the kitchen and put on the kettle for coffee.

  Outside sparrows, blue tits and pigeons were flying over in squadrons to the bird-tables and baths of No 72, my attached neighbour, and unattached 76 the other side of the wall.

  I have nothing against birds, or any creature come to that. My mother used to have a bird-bath also, but I never remembered to fill it. It was drily down there somewhere by the end fence, among the weeds and ivy. And beyond, stood the fir.

  Gradually I glanced out at the fir.

  Which was how I saw the thing sitting there on the paving.

  It was a large black plastic dustbin. Not, I hasten to add, a dirty one. This was spic and span. It looked brand new. There was even a red and white sticker left on the lid.

  I switched off the kettle.

  Nothing else out there was disturbed. Certainly the airforce of birds wasn’t nervous.

  Perhaps ridiculously I picked up the bread knife. I undid the kitchen door and emerged.

  The air was lit, and peaceable with noisy morning sounds.

  I walked over the paving and inspected the dustbin.

  It was definitely new, pristine in fact. I don’t know why, possibly force of habit for this is what one does with dustbins, I reached out and pulled off the lid.

  As I did this, complete terror gripped me. I had an instant mental picture of Joseph Traskul, like some handsome, hideous jack-in-the-box, leaping out of the interior – Surprise! Surprise!

  But there was nothing like that. There was something in the vault of the bin. I could see at once what it was but its incongruity made it incomprehensible to me. I stood there staring. In the end I dropped the lid on, walked back into the kitchen, shut and locked the door. And saw again the letter that had been on the mat.

  Now I grabbed hold of it. Dropping the knife I ripped the envelope open.

  A leaf of plain white paper was inside with strong, erratic writing in black biro, not astonishingly the very same writing as was on the outside.

  I removed it. It could be read clearly enough: Back garden. See bin. Open to find 1 x bottle of Wincott’s Special.

  Which was of course exactly what I had done, and found.

  “Hello. I wonder if I could speak to Harris?”

  “Arriz,” said an unfamiliar and not very kindly female voice. “Mr Why Bother do you men?”

  “That’s right. I…”

  “He’s off.”

  “He’s not there?”

  “Noah. He’s gone to Spine.”

  “Already.”

  “Yez. Abuts dad.”

  “I see. Do you know when he’ll…”

  “No I don’t. I’m hellip for Miss Lornce.”

  “Oh, I see. I suppose Miss Lawrence isn’t…”

  “Mss Lornces owd.”

  “Could you tell her Roy called.”

  “Ray.”

  “Roy. Roy Phipps.”

  “Roy Fibs. Yez, I’ll tell.”

  The phone went down quite forcefully before I could ask if Janette Lawrence, Harris’s fiancée, would call me back, or when I could call
again.

  Once more a dead end, then. I’d already tried a couple of other publishing semi-friends, ostensibly to check on business matters, a contract, a payment. I had wanted to try them out, see what they thought it was best for me to do. There is a strange chap who seems to have followed me from central London. No, I haven’t a clue why. He latched on to me in a pub, and now he’s left a dustbin in my garden.

  A difficult speech. No doubt they’d only assume I was trying out on them a new plot-line for some sinister tale.

  Actually I could imagine Lewis Rybourne at Gates saying, “Oh come on, Roy. That’s drivel. Why would someone do something so – well frankly soppy. Is there a body in the fucking bin or what?”

  Should I therefore call the police? I could imagine that too. All the world reeling with terror threats, rapes, murders and burglary with violence, and myself phoning them about my problem. “Well, some people, sir, might be very grateful for a nice clean bin. Not to mention a free jar.”

  It got to noon, and I couldn’t settle to anything, or decide what to do. I’d placed the note and envelope in a plastic sandwich bag and put them in a drawer, to protect DNA. The bin and beer I left where they were. A pair of pigeons subsequently flew over and landed there momentarily, and one had relieved itself on the purity of the lid. I went upstairs and belatedly shaved and dressed. I shut and locked every window, even the narrow one in the lavatory. Downstairs, all bolted and barred, I poured the cold coffee I had made and not drunk into the sink. Outside the bin was still there, undisturbed except by me and the pigeon.

  The house has a burglar alarm. I didn’t very often activate it, as it had a handy knack of going off for no apparent reason. Now I did. Next both sides had people in all day, 72 an elderly but spry couple, 76 a house-husband with a child that went to school and came back for lunch.

  I walked out of the house and double-locked the door.

  Despite the sun it was cooler today. I scanned carefully up and down the street as I had already done with the path and the back alley from my upper rooms, my bedroom, the lavatory and adjacent bathroom.

  All this was very silly. But I write such stories. I know how appallingly worrying these tiny incidents may seem. Anything that doesn’t fit the everyday, even an everyday established menace – like a thug with a gun or a warning from a gang.

  At the end of Old Church Lane I turned into Bulivante Crescent. Round the curve of detached houses, meshed in their hedges and trees, lay the roaring high street. But even as I took in the vista, I saw him, seated on a low wall, drinking from a can of cola.

  He wore white today, a white shirt and whitish jeans. Over his shoulder was that kind of male handbag that is so useful, and this too was in a sort of bleached denim. He had already seen me. He got up, smiling, and raised his friendly hand in greeting. No recrimination was obvious at his having had to wait for me so long.

  FOUR

  No one ever told me anything about the sexual act. As for love, it was something you saw in films. By the time I was seventeen, you could see quite a bit of the sexual act in them, too, particularly in foreign cinemas in the West End. I had also been handed certain educational books by my father when I was about fourteen. He suggested I read them; I was now ‘old enough’ to ‘understand’. Needless to say I already understood. One’s body tends to inform one. Despite all this however, I wasn’t a quick learner, I wasn’t ready to equate what I felt with any chance of sharing it. It was a solitary pleasure, as they were wont to say. I needn’t, I think, go into details. My own writing is scanty in this respect. I will open the bedroom door and let my protagonists through. But what goes on thereafter the reader may deduce for himself.

  Repressed? Of course I was, and am, and very wisely. I was an unattractive thin spotty youth, who grew into a short, thin and nondescript male adult. My hair was already going at twenty, despite all the preparations I tried on it. My height had never materialised. I wasn’t a ‘Tich’, like Mark Brighton, the poor sucker in my last year at school, who was still under five foot. Men go on growing, they say, until they are twenty-one. Maybe he suddenly dashed a final thirteen inches and put them all to shame. But there are short men with plenty of charisma. Not me.

  By seventeen I had liked girls, fancied girls. (Fantasised girls). But I’d never been to bed with one. Naturally I lied about this. Did anyone believe me? Doubtful.

  Then I left Chaults Grammar and started to work in the central library. One night when I was eighteen I went to the Feathers for a drink with some partial friends, and there in a corner I saw Maureen Parner.

  Truthfully, I barely gave her a second glance.

  She was well over thirty, and this was in the early 1970s. She was just a woman with done-up blondish hair, sipping spirits with a fat man who kept laughing. There were girls elsewhere in the bar with swinging hair and off-the-shoulder tops and blue nails. My three male companions ogled them, as did I. “Look at her. What ya think?” “I like her friend best.” “Her skirt’s too short.” “Well, that’s OK.” “Yeah but the legs aren’t good enough.”

  The evening rambled on, getting smokier and darker. It was just October, and outside the then-white streetlamps lit a scene of rainy murk. In the Feathers rings formed about the yellow lamps, and over there Maureen Parner, barely seen by me, sat on with her fat escort, crossing and uncrossing her plump, shapely, stockinged legs.

  Everyone smoked then. About ten-thirty, only half an hour from closing time, the air was tindery stale and brown. Mick and Steve had got off with a ‘couple of birds’. Danny, who was a non-starter as was I, decided he needed to get home. “Promised I’d mow the lawn tomorrow. My dad always wants it done, right up till November. Mad. It’s my last Saturday off and all.”

  Left alone in the Bacchanalia, I had another half, I’d already swallowed five or six – abruptly it felt like a whole barrel.

  And that was when I did see her. Maureen.

  A lot of people did.

  She got up, slung the contents of a full glass of gin and lime in the fat man’s face and said, quite loudly and in a very beautiful voice that had a cockney accent, “You rotten bleeder! Well damn you, then. Get lost.”

  (Maureen’s voice was lovely. When I heard her sing to her piano, the songs of Ivor Novello, Cole Porter, The Beatles, she had no trace of any accent. Hers was a clear rich soprano, silvery on the higher notes and plum-lush in the lower register. She’d sung professionally in her early youth. There’d been talk of light opera, the stage. But her husband happened instead. Back then, the late fifties, women’s careers often finished at the altar.)

  The fat man rose. He wiped his face, swore, and left her. He stalked past my table.

  Even then I used to be careful who I stared at, or at whom I stared, mitigating my glances into something more clandestine, so I hoped.

  But Maureen Parner merely got to her feet and went into the Ladies.

  As for me, my head was now ringing like a bell. I too hoisted my thin frame upright, left most of my drink, and wavered out into the misty night.

  I was sitting on the bench by the bus-stop in the main road when she emerged from the Feathers. She wasn’t drunk. She had spruced up her pale pink lipstick and relacquered her hair – not that I could have worked that out then, she just looked fresh, almost new. She came straight along the pavement and sat down beside me, about a foot away.

  “Has it gone?”

  “I beg your…”

  “The bus. The 176.”

  “Er, no.”

  That was my bus, too.

  “Thank God,” she said. “My watch’s stopped. Thought I’d missed it. Then it’s only the other one and all round the houses. Get home at midnight.”

  “Yes.”

  She faced front. After a minute she opened her bag and took out a packet of cigarettes. She lit one then turned to me. “Sorry, do you smoke?”

  “Not – yes.”

  “Like one?”

  I didn’t often smoke, it had never got a hold on me, t
ry to let it as I had. And I didn’t want one now, I felt saddled enough by booze. But I said, “Thank you.”

  She let me choose the cigarette, then let me light it from hers. This was very thrilling, strange, disturbing. I could smell her powder and scent. She said, “Don’t you speak nicely.”

  “Er…”

  “I suppose everybody bloody saw all that in there.”

  I said nothing.

  She said, “He’s an absolute bastard. Don’t know why I put up with him so long. And now he’s seen someone he likes more than me. Some twenty-one-year-old bloody tart no doubt, miniskirt up her arse and thinks he’s got some money. Which he hasn’t, I could tell her. Worse than my Graham,” she added. She had turned again and looked on out into the damp smoke of the night. Across the road cars, the odd last bus, sparkled by; vehicles were scarce now because it was well after eleven, and on such roads, in those days, much of the traffic had eased by then.

  She had a face that made me look. It wasn’t pretty particularly, not beautiful or even very original. But it was a real face, flesh and blood, and with make-up tastefully applied, and she had such a nice smell. And her mouth was… I kept looking at her mouth.

  Finally she said in a brisk sensible tone, “This damned bus isn’t coming, is it? Cancelled it, the buggers.” I had never, then, heard a woman of Maureen’s age, (which was actually about thirty-three) swear such a lot. It had a kind of daring to it, a finesse. She said, “D’you fancy some fish and chips? There’s a place down College Road. Just make it. Come on, you look like you could do with a good meal.”

  I scrambled up and went after her, frantically going over in my mind how much money I had left in my brand new wallet. Her high heels clipped along the pavement, and when I got level, she reached across with a weightless gesture and took my arm, as though we had been doing this for months. Only then was I quite sure that I, though so short and she in her heels, was still a good four inches the taller. And that was the moment I felt the rush of desire, the enchantment of relief.