To Indigo, Tanith Lee [best ereader for comics .TXT] 📗

the fucking door in. All right? Now fuck off.”

“That’s awful that is – the postman – we ough-a get the pigs…”

“Fuck off.”

No 2 seemed sad. “OK, Billy,” he said. “Look, here I go.”

And he left us.

“My fucking name ain’t Bill, neither,” said 3A to me with obvious emphasis.

I nodded again.

We left the flat and went down the stairs, leaving plenty of space for the ambling barefoot No 2 to get to his lair before us.

Reaching his own flat 3A lumbered aside, went in and slammed the door. In the absence of the noisy music of No 5, the sound reverberated throughout the building.

I hurried the rest of the way to the street.

After I’d crossed the road and reached the far side of the park I glanced back. At each of two of the windows facing front, presumably those of No 2 and No 3A, a solitary form stood looking out. 3A simply stood guard there. No 2, lower down and perhaps made far-sighted by his ‘stuff’, raised his bony arm in a wave.

THIRTEEN

The train left soon after two o’clock. I sat in the long carriage, with its ultra narrow aisles and seats, and tried to read the Radio Times. There were only a handful of people in the carriage. The whole train was sparsely filled. Beyond the polarised windows the suburbs unwound under a dismal sky. I took out my notebook and made a couple of notes for the commissioned novel.

As each station materialised, I wondered if Joseph Traskul Sej were peering out of another carriage, to see if I had alighted at an earlier stop to my usual one.

Once a young man got off the train who bore a fleeting resemblance to him. I stared, and saw it wasn’t he.

The train was slow. It took nearly forty minutes. When I came to my station I felt an edgy excitement, and reaching the platform, turned and looked round. A bald man from my carriage, in a brown shirt, had got off also. He was about forty. He looked straight ahead and went past me, down the steps.

Sometimes I get a taxi, though it’s only a twenty minute walk to Old Church Lane. Today I didn’t. I’d spent enough, and if I went north soon, there’d be more to fork out.

Then, walking up the high street, busy with afternoon shopping and kids on bicycles careering along the pavement, I considered that a taxi-driver might have been handy if any surprises were waiting. Although in fact, he wouldn’t want to be involved. Non-involvement is the key signature for most of us now, myself included.

Just before I turned into Bulivante Crescent I noticed the man in brown again. He was about thirty yards behind me, looking in a shop window.

Immediately I was tense. Was he following me?

Mentally I shook myself.

No. Not every person I saw was likely to follow me.

Only one person. And he, for now, was not in evidence.

All the way up the Crescent I anticipated him. He might step from behind a tree. Out of a house even, with a friendly farewell gesture to some now-collusive occupant, whom he had conned with one more inventive tale.

When I reached 72, I hesitated. George and Vita weren’t to be seen. No doubt they were at the back, in the kitchen, making afternoon tea and chatting. I envied them sometimes. Their blossoming, undemanding dual companionship.

On the path I looked round again.

The man from 88 was watering his lawn with a sprinkler. So many men are at home now during the day, even the young ones; I used to be the exception. A cat was washing itself on the wall of 73, oblivious of the yapping poodle at the front room window.

Nothing out of place.

I reached the door.

Here I had the strangest moment of déjà vu. It was as if, not Joseph Traskul, but my parents had recently been on the premises. As if it had become their house again, I only their son, lodging there, coming and going, as many sons do.

But I braced myself and put the key in the lock. The door had been firmly shut, and now it opened. The hall lay before me, with four letters scattered on the mat. To my alert gaze nothing seemed amiss. Nothing was wrong.

The house had an air of silence and immobility, as if the owner had been away a few days. He had.

No residue of Joseph seemed to linger.

I was certain now he had not returned here.

Nevertheless I considered leaving the door ajar. Then thought better of it. I went into the hall. I looked up the stairs. I meant to go to the kitchen first. That was where I’d left him, where he had recovered, thrown up in the sink. Something however made me go instead directly into the front room. As I did so of course I recalled again the vulnerable dog of red glass.

Maybe this is the most peculiar thing to try to convey at this point. Standing in the door of the room I felt no shock, none at all.

I suppose it could have been because the piano, which was now installed there against the left hand wall, where the print of Monet’s Sunday at Agenteuil had once been and was no longer, rested in virtually the same place as the previous piano during my parents’ occupancy.

Unlike my mother, Joseph had set the red glass dog on the piano’s top.

That night in 1974, Maureen invited me round, and she’d made me what my mother would have called a ‘proper dinner’. It was roast lamb and roast potatoes with all the ‘trimmings’, and cheesecake from Mercers to follow, plus a bottle of decent red wine and some brandy for later.

Maureen was a good cook. She did it without any fuss either, whipping off her apron and appearing in a sexy dress. In the beginning her attire had sometimes even put me off the food I was so earnest to get her through the bedroom door.

“This is