Personal Darkness (18 page)

No girl who came in here stayed unbroken, or unlearned.

He would know Ruth, by the time he had finished.

She stood up. She said, "I want to go now."

Lorlo laughed good-humoredly. "Can't oblige. Come on, why waste yourself?"

"I want to go."

"Can't, doll. Tell ya. We can do it nice, or do it rough. Honey and Frankie can come in if you want and hold you down. Yes? You want that? Or you and I can have a party. Just the two of us. You ain't going nowhere."

The girl's face did not change. He had seen it all, and now he expected something. But there was nothing.

She said quietly, "My dad will come. My father will come and find me. You'll be sorry."

Lorlo laughed again. He felt clean and young and fit, and ready as a donkey. "Don't think so, doll." He glanced at Bette Davis on her back with the dust of cocaine in her hair. "Now go and wash. Don't be too long."

WERE TWO PEOPLE DOWNSTAIRS on the late bus, and one of them smiled as Malach got on. The smile was not for Malach. It was a twisting up of elderly male lips that showed stained, smoker's, bad false teeth bathed in Steradent once every seven or eight days. The eyes were shiny with venom. The smiling man angled himself a little to the aisle.

"What do you think of that, then?"

The elderly woman, nothing to do with the elderly man, stretched her mouth subserviently. "Ah." And looked away.

The bus started off into the Martian-lit darkness.

Malach sat about halfway down the bus, in his black, his long legs edged a little out into the aisle. His white hair lay back behind him, gleaming like a sheet of ice.

"Get to Woolworth's soon," announced the elderly man. "Knock 'em up. Get some scissors."

The elderly woman giggled. If she had been young, she might have liked Malach's hair. It sparkled, was tactile, and savage as fur. But she was getting on now, and the wicked crime of youth was, it was wasted on the young. The man spoke again. "Yes, some good sharp scissors. That's what he needs."

Seen from the front, Malach's eyelids had lowered themselves a centimeter over the pale lapis eyes. That was all.

The bus lurched around a corner. The smiling man got up. His stop was coming. He edged past Malach, and stood near the doors. He peered back.

"He's like Goldilocks," said the man, " 'n' he?"

Malach looked up at him.

"And are you one of the three bears?" he asked politely.

But the elderly man was too entrenched in his poison to hear.

"Six years I served my country," he said. He stood straight, muffled in his dirty, musty garments of faded sick yellows and browns. On his head the properly short hair greasily coiled, laved with soap once a fortnight, otherwise washed in ashtrays. "Six years, for the likes of this."

The bus had been caught at the lights. It had halted and the man stared out into the orange dark, gathering himself. Then he turned again and looked sidelong at Malach, not quite into Malach's face. "Six years I served. So he can go walking about with his hair down to his bum. Disgusting."

No, he had not looked into Malach's face. Had not seen it. Like the face of a stone angel, and with the hair of an angel.

The bus bounced and started off again, and so reached the stop.

The elderly man with the short hair got off.

Malach rose in darkness, and went after him.

"Ooer," said the elderly woman, softly.

At first, as he walked along, Arthur Simpkins was not aware of any pursuit.

He was thinking of soaking his feet.

It had not been much of an evening. He had won nothing at Bingo, he should never have gone. Waste of money and there was little enough of that. These blacks could get it, with their whining and jabbering. These queers and freaks. But it was different if you kept to yourself, got on without complaining. Still, the government was tougher now. Trust Thatcher, she had the right ideas. Not like the usual stupid woman.

And that one on the bus. God almighty. That was what they were like now.

They needed a war to sort them out.

He had had that, and it had done him no harm. Best years of his life, in a way. The companionship of real men, knowing you were someone, that you counted, what you said carried weight.

As he turned down his road, Arthur Simpkins felt a primeval need to look over his shoulder.

He did so.

There behind him, about forty feet away, a tall black figure in a slim loose coat. The Martian streetlamps caught the yard of hair.

Arthur Simpkins felt his belly gurgle and a sour taste came into his mouth, through the familiar pall of fags and dentures.

He speeded up, walking quickly now. Not far. Soon be indoors.

He got to the low wall and went through the gate. A strip of cement was there which an Irishman had laid cheaply three years ago. The front door needed paint. Arthur Simpkins unlocked it hastily. As he slipped inside he saw his pursuer standing motionless under a lamp.

When he bolted the door on the inside the elderly man had a strange sense of siege which was not happy. But he shook himself. What could that namby-pamby do? Trying to frighten him, but he was a soldier.

He went to check the back door was bolted, then put the kettle on.

Twenty minutes later, when Arthur Simpkins brought his tea, and the steaming bowl of hot water, with a dash of Fairy Liquid, into his front room, he saw through the window, whose curtains were not drawn, the white-haired man sitting on his garden wall.

He should go to the window, bang on it, and shake his fist. But Arthur Simpkins decided not to. No, better just to let him get fed up and go. Probably on drugs or drunk. These kids were all the same, they all had money to burn.

Arthur Simpkins took the bowl and the tea out of the front room and into the small dining room. Here he switched on the overhead light and drew the curtains, shutting out the square of Irish cement garden.

He sat drinking his tea, and rolled a cigarette, being careful not to waste any tobacco. He took off his shoes, but, with his socks still on, he crept back into the front room again, to look.

The white-haired man was still there. He was just sitting, not facing the house even, staring along the street, as if he was waiting for someone by appointment.

Trying to put the wind up. Young bugger.

Arthur Simpkins went back into the dining room, and drank the rest of his tea and finished his cigarette. On the floor the bowl steamed less.

There were no ornaments in the room, as there were none in the front room. Over the fire hung a framed photograph of Arthur Simpkins the warrior, with two of the other men. They were beaming and contented in their battledress. You knew where you were then. Under the photograph hung a medal. He had his pride.

On the dining-room table lay Arthur Simpkins's scrapbooks of the Royal Family, and the little pile of cuttings that he had yet to insert. He had been going to see to those tonight, out he could not settle.

The water in the bowl had got cold,

He would go and boil up the kettle again.

Arthur Simpkins went out, and, creeping once more, passed around the wall of the front room to the window.

Still there.

What should he do? Call the police? It seemed extreme. But then, this was a threat, was it not, implicit. He was a poor old man. He was alone.

Arthur Simpkins sidled to the small bureau where the telephone was kept. Above it hung the other picture in the house, of the Queen trooping the color. It seemed to offer slight protection, and as he raised the receiver, outside the man on the wall turned his head. He looked straight in at the window as if he had heard the receiver being lifted.

Arthur Simpkins's hand shook. And in his ear he heard a tinny silence. There was no dialing tone.

He turned on the phone, working the cradle a couple of times, without hope. You could rely on nothing nowadays. He could be dying, and the phone not working.

Then he looked up, the dead receiver in his shaking hand, and relief washed through him in a scalding wave.

The man was gone from the wall.

No trace of him.

He must have seen Arthur Simpkins on the phone through the window and, not realizing the instrument was useless, got scared.

Yellow, a coward. No backbone. That was how they were.

Arthur Simpkins slung the receiver back on the hook. The thing would probably have righted itself in the morning.

Whistling, he went out to the kitchen to boil up the kettle again.

Then he carried it into the dining room and added the hot water to the cold. He left the kettle on the carpet and slipped off his socks. Aside from a bath, which he took regularly once a week, the foot soaking was his little luxury.

He rolled another cigarette. He might watch a bit of TV in the front, after. (Though there would doubtless be nothing but rubbish, blacks and nancy boys.) It was too late to start on the cuttings now. He would do them tomorrow.

Malach penetrated the gardens, agile, like a cat. The fences were low, the ground strewn only with flowerpots and gnomes.

Even from the back, the house of Malach's quarry was at once identifiable. Its barren yard, and general appearance. Years of neglect had stamped themselves upon it. There were no plants, no garden toys, no dog food set out for hedgehogs. The man with short hair was sufficient unto himself.

The kitchen, like an outhouse, stretched from the back wall. The door was bolted and locked. Above, two unlit windows with undrawn curtains.

Malach set one foot against the brickwork. He put his hands there. He began to climb, up the wall. There were the thousand crevices of desuetude, the pointing was no more, his long fingers tucked into the gaps and the long feet followed. His spine was straight, he moved like water flowing, upward. In the lamp dark, almost invisible, but for the beacon of hair.

When he had reached the sloping kitchen roof he stepped delicately across the tiles and onto its brickwork ridge. He walked along it to the bathroom window.

Like knives, his ringers drove into the rotted frame, the crumbled, sixty-year-old putty. Dust, rot, and ancient flakes of paint fell away. Then the frame came up and out, and the window with it.

There had been scarcely a sound. A noise maybe like a cat scratching.

He lowered the window in, onto the bathroom lino.

The smells of the house pushed out of their long imprisonment. Tobacco smoke and nicotine, old midday dinners of mince, kippers, tinned peas, cabbage and spuds, the stench of the never-cleansed lavatory.

In the dark the bath glowed pale, with cracks of verdigris where the taps for ever dripped. Above the washbasin was a tiny shaving mirror, and below, on a shelf, razor and brush, the Steradent, the greasy comb, soap, and slimy flannel.

Outside, across the landing, the bedroom, the box room.

Malach did not bother with them.

He passed like a shadow down the worn carpet of the stairs.

With the years the eighteen-inch TV had grown muffled and low, and Arthur Simpkins was forced to turn it up.

He sat in the mustard armchair, his feet again in the bowl of hot water which he had carried through, a threadbare towel on the maroon carpet, trousers rolled up. His old legs were maps of veins. His mouth had dropped open in half-sleep. On the screen in black and white, tanks rolled across a wasteland. A voice boomed out of Beirut.

Then a shadow moved between Arthur Simpkins and Beirut.

Silence exploded in the room like a shell.

Arthur Simpkins awoke.

The TV had gone. Someone had switched it off.

He looked up, and for the first time he saw the face of Malach, aureoled in a cloud of burning white.

"Oh, Gawd," said Arthur Simpkins. He tried to rise and his feet slipped in the Fairy Liquid water, and he fell back. "How did you— Don't hurt me. Don't you hurt me. I'm an old man."

Malach nodded across the room.

Arthur Simpkins turned and saw, over the chair, the picture of the Queen in red.

"So," said Malach, "these are the gods you pray to."

"I'm an old man," said Arthur Simpkins. He dribbled, his false teeth slipping as his body shrank in fear. "Don't do nothing."

Malach looked down from his height like something on the wing.

And then he had shifted, and was behind the chair.

"Your hair," said Malach. He placed his hands, the left with its bracing of silver rings, upon Arthur Simp-kins's head. The fingers curved, and rested at the hairline. "Your hair is too long."

Arthur Simpkins felt a sting, like that of a wasp. Eight times. The nails of Malach had torn into his flesh. Very deep. He screamed.

Before he could scream again, in two neat perfect strips, Malach scalped him.

The moon was up, a lion's mask, the same as if above a desert.

Malach came out of the front door and quietly closed it.

He was immaculate.

The street was empty in the curse of the orange light. Then a man slipped from the shade between the lamps. He ran to Malach like a messenger on some quay of the Nile; and reaching him, at the gate of Arthur Simpkins, who by morning would be dead, the man bowed.