Not Safe After Dark (36 page)

Frank remembered the day he bought it all those years ago: the fairground across the street from the small jeweller’s; the air filled with the smells of candyfloss and fried onions and the
sounds of children laughing and squealing with delight. A little girl in a white frock with pink smocking had smiled at him as she passed by, one arm hugging a huge teddy bear and the other hand
holding her mother’s. How light his heart had been. Inside, the ring was inscribed, ‘FRANK AND JOAN. 21 JULY 1946. NO GREATER LOVE.’ The bastards. It could mean nothing to
them.

Listlessly, he checked his own room. Drawers pulled out, socks and underwear scattered on the bedclothes. Nothing worth stealing except the spare change he kept on his bedside table. Sure
enough, it was gone, the $3.37 he had piled neatly into columns of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies last night.

They didn’t seem to have got far in the spare room, where he kept his war mementos. Maybe they got disturbed, scared by a sound, before they could open the lock on the cabinet. Anyway,
everything was intact: his medals; the antique silver cigarette lighter that had never let him down; the bayonet; the Nazi armband; the tattered edition of
Mein Kampf
; the German dagger with
the mother-of-pearl swastika inlaid in its handle.

Frank went downstairs and considered what to do. He knew he should put the gun back in its hiding place and call the police. But that would mean intrusion, questions. He valued his privacy and
he knew that the neighbours thought he was a bit of an oddball. What would the police think of him, a man who kept the torso of a tailor’s dummy in his living-room, along with yards of
moth-eaten material and tissue-paper patterns? What if they found his gun?

No, he couldn’t call the police; he couldn’t have them trampling all over his house. They never caught burglars, anyway; everyone knew that. Weary, and still a little frightened,
Frank nailed a piece of plywood over the broken glass, then carried his gun upstairs with him to bed.

•

The following morning was one of those light, airy days of early June, the kind that brings the whole city to the Beaches. The sky was robin’s-egg blue, the sun shone like
a pale yolk, and a light breeze blew off the lake to keep the temperature comfortable. In the gardens, apple and cherry blossom clung to the trees and the tulips were still in full bloom. It was a
day for sprinklers, swimsuits, barbecues, bicycle rides, volleyball and lawn sales.

Normally, Frank would have gone down to the boardwalk, about the only exercise he got these days. Today, however, a change had come over him; a shadow had crept into his life and chilled him to
the bone, despite the fine weather. He felt a deep lassitude and malaise. So much so that he delayed getting out of bed.

Maybe it was the dream made him feel that way. Though perhaps it wasn’t right to call it a dream when it was so close to something that had really happened. It recurred every few months,
and he had come to accept it now, much as one accepts the chronic pain of an old wound, as a kind of cross to bear.

Separated from his unit once in rural France during the Second World War, he had dragged himself out of a muddy stream, cigarettes tied up safely in army-issue condoms to keep them dry, and
entered a forest. A few yards in, he had come face to face with a young German soldier, who looked as if he had also probably lost his comrades. They stared open-mouthed at each other for the split
second before Frank, operating purely on survival instinct, aimed his revolver first and fired. The boy simply looked surprised and disappointed at the red patch that spread over his chest, then
his face emptied of all expression for ever. Light-headed and numb, Frank moved on, looking for his unit.

It wasn’t the first German he had killed, but it was the first he had looked in the eye. The incident haunted him all the way back to his unit, but a few hours later he had convinced
himself that he had done the right thing and put it behind him.

After the war the memory surfaced from time to time in dreams. Details changed, of course. Each time the soldier had a different face, for example. Once, Frank even reached forward and put his
finger into the bullet hole. The soft, warm flesh felt like half-set jelly. He was sure he had never touched it in real life.

Another time, the boy spoke to him. He spoke in English and Frank couldn’t remember what he said, though he was sure it was a poem, and the words ‘I knew you in this dark’
stuck in his mind. But Frank knew nothing of poetry.

This time the bullet had gone straight through, leaving a clean circle the size of a ring, and Frank had seen a winter landscape, all flat white and grey, through the hole.

He still had the gun he had used that day. It was the same one he had got down from the high cupboard last night when he thought the burglars might still be in the house. It was the one he felt
for now under the pillow beside him.

•

Had he got up that day? He couldn’t remember. He sat propped against pillows on his bed that night watching television as usual. He felt agitated, and whatever the figures
on the screen were doing or saying didn’t register. For some reason, he couldn’t get the wedding ring out of his mind, the senselessness of its theft and the unimaginable value it had
for him. He hadn’t realized it fully until the ring was gone.

Then he thought he heard some noise outside. He turned the sound off with the remote and listened. Sure enough, he could hear voices. Beyond his back garden was a narrow alleyway, then came the
backs of the stores and low-rise apartment buildings on Queen Street. Sometimes in this warm weather, when everyone had their windows open, you could hear arguments, television programmes and loud
music. These were real voices, Frank could tell. Television voices sounded different. There were two of them, a woman’s and a man’s, hers getting louder.

‘No, Daryl, it won’t do!’ he heard the woman shout. ‘Haven’t I told you before it’s wrong to steal? Haven’t I brought you up to respect other
people’s property? Haven’t I?’

Frank couldn’t hear the muffled answer, no matter how much he strained. He dragged himself up from the bed and went to the window.

‘So if Marvin Johnson stuck his finger in a fire, you’d do that as well, would you? Christ, give me a break. How stupid can you get?’

Another inaudible reply.

‘Right. So how do you think
they
feel, eh? The people whose house you broke into. Come on. What did you do with it?’

Frank couldn’t hear the reply, though he held his breath.

‘Don’t lie to me. What do you think this is? It’s a gold chain, isn’t it? And what about these? Don’t tell me you’ve suddenly started wearing earrings. I
found these hidden in your room. You stole them, didn’t you?’

Frank’s heart knocked against his ribs. Joan had a gold chain and earrings, and they were among the items that had been stolen. But what about the ring? The ring?

‘Shut up!’ the woman yelled. ‘I don’t want to hear it. I want you to put together everything you stole and take it back, or so help me I’ll call the police. I
don’t care if you are my son. Do you understand me?’

There came another inaudible reply followed by a sharp smack, then the sound of a door slamming. After that Frank heard a sound he didn’t recognize at first. A cat in the garden, maybe?
Then he realized it was the woman crying.

About five of the apartments in the building had lights on at the back, and Frank hadn’t been able to tell from which one the argument came. Now, though, he could see the silhouette of the
woman with her head bowed and her hands held to her face. He thought he knew who she was. He had seen both her and her son on the street.

•

Frank sat in the coffee shop across from the apartment building early the next morning and watched people come and go. The building was one of those old places with a heavy wood
and glass door, so warped by heat and time that it wouldn’t shut properly. He knew who he was looking for, all right. It was that peroxide blonde, the one who looked like a hooker.

At about eight-thirty, her son, the thief, came out. He had a spotty face, especially around the nose and mouth, and he obviously had a skinhead haircut, or a completely shaved head, under the
baseball hat he wore the wrong way around. He also wore a shiny silver jacket with a stylized black eagle on the back under some red writing. Below his baggy trousers, crotch right down to the
knees, the laces of his sneakers trailed loose. At the corner, he hooked up with a couple of similarly dressed kids and they shuffled off, shoving each other, spitting and generally glaring down at
the sidewalk as they went.

At about ten o’clock Frank had to move to the next coffee shop, a bit more up market, as he kept getting nasty looks from the owner. He ordered a cappuccino and a doughnut and sat by the
window, watching.

At about a quarter to eleven,
she
came out, the boy’s mother. She struggled with a shop cart of laundry through the front door and set off down the street.

Old though he was, Frank could still appreciate a good figure when he saw one. She wore a white tube-top, tight over her heavy breasts, revealing a flat tummy, and even tighter white shorts cut
sharp and high over long, tanned thighs. But she wore too much make-up and he could see the dark roots in her hair. Common as muck, Joan would have said, in the Lancashire accent that had never
left her, no matter how long she’d been here. A real tart, a piece of white trash. No wonder her kid was a burglar, a ring thief, a robber of memories, defiler of all things decent and
wholesome.

Frank watched her totter down the street on her ridiculous high heels and go into the laundromat. It took about half an hour for the wash cycle and about as long again to get things dry. That
gave Frank an hour. He paid his bill, crossed the street and entered the apartment building.

•

He hadn’t really formed a plan, even during the hours he had spent watching the building that morning. He knew from last night that the apartment was on the third floor at
the back, right in the centre, which made it easy to find. The corridor smelled of soiled diapers and Pine-Sol. When he stood outside the door, he listened for a while. All he could hear was a baby
crying on the next floor up and the bass boom of a stereo deep in the basement.

Frank had never broken the law in his life, and he was intelligent enough to recognize the irony of what he was about to do. But he was going to do it anyway because the absence of the ring was
beginning to make his life hell. Nothing else really mattered.

For three days he had waited for the boy to return Joan’s jewellery, as his mother had told him to do. Three days of nail-biting memories: dreaming about the German soldier he had killed
again; reliving Joan’s long illness and death; watching again, as if it were yesterday, the woman he had loved and lived with for nearly fifty years waste away in agony in front of his eyes.
So thin did she become that one day the ring simply slipped off her finger onto the shiny pink quilt.

And now that he was on the brink of remembering the final horror, her death, the ring had assumed the potency of a talisman. He must have it back to keep his sanity, to keep the last memories at
bay.

He had watched people on television open doors with credit cards, so he took out his seniors’ discount card and tried to push it between the door and the lock. It wouldn’t fit. He
could get it part of the way in, then something blocked it; he waggled it back and forth, but still nothing happened. He cursed. This didn’t happen on television. What was he going to do now?
It looked as if he was destined to fail. He rested his head against the wood and tried to think.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

His heart jumped and he turned as quickly as he could.

‘I said what do you think you’re doing?’

It was her, the slut, standing there with her hands on her hips. It was disgusting, that bare midriff. He could see her belly button. He looked away.

‘No, please.’ He found his voice. ‘Don’t. I won’t harm you.’

She laughed. ‘You harm me!’ she said. ‘That’s a laugh. Now go on, get out of here before I really
do
call the police.
Old
man.’

Frank had to admit she certainly didn’t look scared. ‘No, you don’t understand,’ he said. There was nothing for it now but to trust her. ‘The robbery. I overheard.
You see, it was
my
house your son broke into.’

She stared at him for a moment, her expression slowly softening, turning sad. She was quite pretty, really, he thought. She had a nice mouth, though her eyes looked a bit hard.

‘You’d better come in, hadn’t you?’ she said, pushing past him and opening the door. ‘I came back for more quarters. Just as well I did, isn’t it, or who
knows what might have happened?’ She had a husky voice, probably from smoking too much.

The room was sparsely furnished, mostly from the Salvation Army or Goodwill, by the looks of it, but it was clean and the only unpleasant smell Frank noticed was stale tobacco. The woman pulled
a packet of Rothmans from her bag, sat down on the wing of an armchair and lit up. She blew out a plume of smoke, crossed her legs and looked at Frank. ‘Sit down, it’ll hold your
weight,’ she said, nodding towards the threadbare armchair opposite her. He sat. ‘Now what do you want? Is it money?’

‘I just want what’s mine,’ Frank said. ‘Your son stole my wife’s jewellery. It’s very important to me, especially the wedding ring. I’d like it
back.’

She frowned. ‘Wedding ring? There wasn’t no wedding ring.’

‘What?’

‘I told you. There wasn’t no wedding ring.’ Sighing, she got up and went into another room. She came back with a handful of jewellery. ‘That’s all I
found.’

Frank looked through it. The only pieces he recognized were the gold chain and the pair of cheap earrings. The rest, he supposed, must have been stolen from another house. ‘I don’t
understand,’ he said. ‘What happened to the ring?’

‘How should I know?’ She stubbed her half-smoked cigarette out viciously. ‘Maybe he sold it already, or threw it away. Look, I gotta go before someone steals the laundry.
That’s
all
I need.’