Mr Toppit (13 page)

Under normal circumstances, when there wasn’t a death in the family, there was a list of things that anyone who was going to spend any time at the house was warned about: the stone flagstones at the back that were like an ice-rink in the rain, the low door frame between the kitchen and the dining room that everyone banged their head on, the loose stair-carpet that had sent at least one person straight to the emergency room, but most particularly the door to the bathroom on the second floor, which was never to be locked.

When I got upstairs, she was still rattling the handle. “I can’t get out,” she whimpered. Then she added: “There’s some kind of
bug
in here!”

“Laurie? The lock’s broken.” I spoke slowly, as if articulating every word might help her understand what I was saying. “You’re not meant to use the key. There’s something wrong with it.”

I knelt down to talk through the keyhole. “What you’ve got to do is—”

“It’s flying around!” she shouted.

“If you don’t frighten it, it won’t hurt you.”

It was like one of those films in which a pilot has a heart attack and a stewardess has to take the controls and guide the plane down following radio instructions from the ground. That was me: I was the ground.

“Laurie? You’ve got to lean on the door, really push it in hard.” The handle rattled again. “Not the door handle, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s the key, it’s the lock. Push!” I could hear Laurie grunting. “Push the door, then turn the key.”

“It’s not turning!”

“Push harder.”

“I can’t!”

I grabbed the handle and pulled it towards me. I could hear Laurie trying to turn the key. There was a loud groan from the other side of the door, then a little click, and I heard the lock scrape as the key turned. I pushed the door open.

“I’m so sorry,” Laurie gasped, but I wasn’t really listening because I was staring at her. She was covered with towels: one round the lower half of her body, one round the top half, one over her shoulders like a large shawl and one over her head like a veil. She looked like an Egyptian mummy who had taken holy orders.

I went into the bathroom and saw the thing that was flying round and round near the window. It was one of those beetles that look so heavy you can’t believe it can get off the ground.

“I hate bugs. I’m sorry,” she said weepily, from the doorway.

A black shroud covered the bath, and it took me a moment to realize that Laurie’s clothes from yesterday were draped over a drying frame. I went past it, heading towards the window. The beetle’s radar must have been faulty: it almost flew into my face. I flicked my hand up, hitting it a glancing blow, and it spiraled to the floor. Laurie gasped. It had felt hard and heavy against the back of my hand.

“Don’t kill it!” she said.

I rather thought she had forfeited the right to an opinion. I grabbed a toothmug from the basin, bent down, and placed it over the beetle. Laurie inched back into the bathroom to see. She had taken off the headdress towel so at least I could see her face.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, leaning over me cautiously. The glass magnified and distorted the beetle. It had a shell as dark and shiny as mahogany. It wasn’t moving, but it wasn’t dead: its feelers were twitching. “Back home, we call these june bugs. You get them in the desert. What are you going to do?” she asked.

I hadn’t thought it was exclusively my problem. “Do you have any paper?” I asked. “Card would be better.”

She looked down at herself, as if she thought I expected her to be hiding some under the towels.

“No—in your room,” I said.

“I didn’t bring any bags with me,” she said, panicked.

I was getting exasperated. “There should be some paperbacks by your bed. Go and get one and we can tear the cover off.”

She seemed doubtful. I spoke very slowly: “Look, I’ll slide the cover under the glass. Then I can lift it up without the thing escaping and I’ll throw it out of the window.”

She nodded. “Oh, that’s a good idea, yes.”

Holding the towels in place, she scuttled back to her bedroom along the landing. She came back and breathlessly handed me a book.

I turned it over to see the front. “Not this one, Laurie.” It was the paperback edition of
Garden Grown
. I handed it back to her. “This is one of my father’s books. I don’t want to tear the cover off it.”

She was mortified. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.”

“Get another.”

When she came back, she was holding a book called
Seven Types of Ambiguity
. It must have been one of Martha’s. I tore off the cover with a satisfying rip. In her other hand, Laurie was still holding Arthur’s book.

I slipped the cover under the glass and lifted the whole contraption. Laurie followed me to the window and opened it. I put my arm out as far as I could, then took away the glass. The beetle sat on the book cover. In the end, I flicked it off and it took flight. It hadn’t come to any harm.

When I got back downstairs, Martha was peering round the sitting-room door. “What was that about, all that banging?”

“Laurie locked herself in the bathroom.”

“I hope you told her not to put Tampax down the loo,” she said, closing the door. It was another thing that was usually on the list to warn people about.

The floorboards were creaking again: Laurie was making her descent. I waited for her at the bottom of the stairs. She was taking small delicate steps as if she might trip, wincing as each stair creaked, and looking at the pictures on the wall. She was holding
Garden Grown
. “Everything’s so old,” she said. “Which era is it from?”

“Oh, it’s very ancient,” I said vaguely. I wasn’t great on history.

When she got to the bottom of the stairs, she said, “I’m so sorry about, you know … the bathroom.”

“That’s okay,” I said. There was a funny smell coming from her, a sort of wet-dog smell. She was dressed in her black clothes from yesterday.

“Would you like something to eat?”

“Oh, no. Well, maybe a cup of coffee. I don’t want to put you to any trouble.” I led the way to the kitchen, and she sat at the table. She placed Arthur’s book, face up, next to her.

Now we sat in silence, except for the little sounds she made with her mouth as she drank her coffee. It wasn’t an awkward silence, exactly, but it was somehow charged. I was having a small bet with myself about how long it would take her to mention Arthur’s book. I hadn’t forgotten “Haymanito hears her calling,” or his name scrawled over and over again. She was tapping the cover of the book lightly with her fingers.

“I don’t even know your last name,” I said.

“It’s Clow.”

I tested it out. “Laurie Clow.”

“Yeah, weird name.” She laughed.

“Why ‘Laurie’?”

“It was my dad’s middle name—Laurence.”

That was an explanation, not a reason. There was another silence. Finally, I said, “We should take that key out of the lock. Everybody gets confused. The thing is, Martha says that if we take it away it’ll get lost.”

She seemed perplexed. “But if it doesn’t work, shouldn’t you throw it away?”

“Well, it’s old, the key. Like an antique.”

“You could put a tag on it. You know, a little colored one.”

“Laurie, how did you know the phone number?” I asked, without thinking. It was something nobody had thought to ask at the hospital and I didn’t know why it had jumped into my mind. Her fingers stopped drumming. “Yesterday,” I added for clarity. “You phoned Martha at the flat. How did you know the number to call?”

She looked up at me with a clear gaze. “Why, he told me, your dad told me the number. He remembered it just like
that.”
She clicked her fingers. “Isn’t that wonderful, with injuries so bad? After the ambulance took him away, I went and called from a phone booth.” Then, with a little nod, she added, “I work in a hospital.”

My stomach lurched. “I didn’t know he was …” I stopped. I was finding this hard to say. “…  conscious before he died.”

“Oh, he was real messed up but he talked some, yes,” she said. A sad smile passed over her face.

Then I did something I really didn’t want to do: I burst into tears.

“Oh, honey, I thought you knew. I thought I said …”

Actually, I couldn’t remember exactly what she had told us
at the hospital, but if she had said that Arthur had talked to her, had had some kind of conversation with her by the side of the road, I wouldn’t have forgotten.

She got up from her chair, came round to my side of the table and put her arms round me. She pulled my face against her damp shoulder. “Don’t fret. He wasn’t hurting. I was just holding his hand, keeping him warm. Then the paramedics came and got him hooked up to something for the pain. They looked after him really well.” She let me go.

“Did he know how badly he was hurt?”

“I don’t think so. I think the body kind of compensates.”

“Are you a nurse?”

“Well, I work in a hospital.”

“But you thought it was a broken leg.”

“I’m not on the medical staff. I work at the hospital radio station.” She looked away. “I’m so sorry. When I got through to your mother I began by telling her he had broken his leg and I was going to, you know, say it was more than that but then the phone went on the fritz, cut me off. I didn’t have any more coins.”

“So what did he say exactly?”

“Well, he kept saying this one word over and over. I thought he was saying ‘Mother.’ He was talking real soft, it was hard to catch. Then he said a phone number. I thought he wanted me to call his mother—that seemed kind of odd. I wrote it on my hand. Look.” She showed me the back of her hand on which, half washed off, was written the telephone number at the flat.

“So he made sense?”

“Oh, yes, he told me his name, said he was called Arthur Hayman.” She nodded, as if his having given his name revealed
everything about his condition. There was a pause: a perceptible change of gear. “He didn’t say he wrote books, though,” she said, with a bright little laugh, indicating
Garden Grown
. “Wow, that’s something, a writer.”

“What else did he say?”

“Mmm?” She was still looking at the book.

“He must have said something else.”

“What do you mean?”

“He said his name and gave you the phone number. That was it?”

“Well, it was hard to catch, he spoke so soft. They were digging up the road. It was kind of noisy, you know. So, the books—what are they about?”

“But you heard the phone number.”

“Yes. And his name,” she said. There was a tiny edge to her voice now.

I appropriated her little laugh. “It sounds like a war film—you know, just his name and number. No other info allowed. Like
The Great Escape.”

She smiled. “That was a great movie.”

“We had it at school last term.”

“You get movies at school?”

“Every other Saturday night.”

“I love movies. What else have you seen?”

I wanted to say I had seen inside her bag at the hospital. I wanted to say I had read her poem. I wanted to ask how many times she had written his name in her notebook. “How long were you sitting with him?”

She looked up at the ceiling, then round the kitchen. She licked her lips. “Well, let’s see, it’s hard to remember. So much was happening.”

I leaned across the table and picked up the book. Her eyes followed it. “There are five of these,” I said. “They’re called
The Hayseed Chronicles
. This is the fourth.” I turned it over in my hand and tapped each side in turn on the table, as if I was straightening a pack of cards.

“Really?” She sounded only mildly interested, but her eyes were narrow and alert, like an animal’s. She held out her hand for the book.

“Do you want some more coffee?” I asked. I stood up and went to the other side of the kitchen with the book. “Kettle’s still hot.”

“Thank you.”

“You put—what? One spoonful?”

“Yes, not too strong.”

“You want milk?”

“Let me,” she said. She got up and came towards me.

I moved past her round the table and sat down. We had now switched places. “The books are like a series. You should probably start with the first. We might have some spare copies,” I said. “I could probably find one. If you wanted.”

There was a short silence. We were making a deal. “It must have been five minutes,” she said. “No more than ten, anyway. So hot, that sidewalk.” She laughed. “The traffic!”

“London’s always busy,” I said.

“The traffic in San Francisco, that’s really something.”

“So you might have been there for ten minutes?”

“Well, maybe five. Hard to tell.”

“And?”

“He talked about you,” she said, in a rush. “And Rachel. Said he had great kids. He sounded really proud of you both. Talked about Martha—Mrs. Hayman—too.” She came back to
the table and sat down. “You shouldn’t be sad. He wasn’t in any pain.” She reached over and took the book from me.

“But how did you know it was Martha he was talking about? You said he kept saying this one word over and over, which you thought was ‘Mother.’ You said you thought you were phoning his mother after the ambulance had taken him.”

“Now I know it was Martha he was talking about. I know it
now
. It was all so confused.”

I knew she wasn’t telling the truth, not just about Martha but about us, too. “He said he had great kids. He sounded really proud” was as unlikely a thing for Arthur to utter, even if he was dying, as a weather report in Sanskrit.

“Laurie, you can tell me. I’m not going to fall to pieces. I’m quite grown-up.”

She smiled at me. “I know you are.” But then she looked away.

“Please,” I said.

“Well, there was one weird thing, but you’ve got to understand, it was really hard for me to pick up what he was saying.”

I was conciliatory. “I know, Laurie.”

“Well, here’s the thing. He kept saying—I thought he kept saying—‘Stop it!’ or ‘Stop it, Mister, stop it!’ I didn’t know what he meant. I thought maybe he was talking about wanting the pain to stop, but I don’t think it was that. It was weird because he spoke so kind of precise, so, you know,
English
, and it sounded like something from a gangster movie.”