Pleasure and a Calling (2 page)

We both looked at the turd I was pointing at, a neat steaming coil that struck me as unusually large for a small dog.

And then he stared at me. ‘Well, what do you want to do about it?’

‘What do
I
want to do? I rather thought
you
might want to do something about it.’ I smiled again.

‘Well, I do not, so piss off. And just mind your own business, you bourgeois knob.’ He stared at me, lips apart, for a second more, then yanked the leash, and turned on to the path for the Common and park. I stood and watched, the dog once more protesting as they crossed the grass and headed down the steps and along the riverside path. He didn’t look back.

Bourgeois knob? I’ve always thought of myself rather as a concerned citizen – a model citizen. There was a thin piece of card to be found in a nearby refuse bin. I eased it beneath the pyramid of cooling sludge and transferred it into a discarded fast-food carton. This I carried back up the hill to the courtyard where
my car was parked outside my flat. OK, I reasoned, this maniac had humiliated me, but so what? You could either burn with fury or you could do the right thing.

I put the carton in the passenger-side footwell of my car, then nipped up to my flat to consult the files I keep there. It didn’t take long. I’m very organized. It turned out we had sold the house to a Judith Bridgens in 2007. Perhaps she had resold to this rude oaf. I called the landline number I had on record. There was no answer. I drove up there and parked some way along Boselle Avenue, then strolled back down to number 4 with an armful of sales literature covering the carton. In the garden behind the high, overgrown privet, only a passer-by glancing over the gate would be likely to see me, and even then only for a second or two. I rang the bell and called the landline again. I heard the phone ringing inside. No one answered. I produced the key now from my waistcoat pocket, unlocked the door, waited, and then stepped over the threshold. Oh yes. I always enjoy the first moment of an empty house before the spell of its silence and stillness is broken by my own breathing and movement. I found my way to the kitchen and contemplated the clean oatmeal tiled floor. Would it do the job? Not quite. Perhaps the sitting room … I pushed open the door on to an airy space with tasteful dining area. French windows overlooked a patio and an uncut lawn and flower borders bedraggled by the weather and neglect. The owner was no gardener. He did, however, have an eye for attractive modern soft furnishings, not least a handsome, chunky, white – you might even say bourgeois – hearth-rug.

There we are, I thought.

I slid the turd, still improbably intact – like a novelty plastic one – into the rug’s luxurious centre, pausing for a moment to appreciate its caramel perfection, its pleasingly vile aroma – freed
now to explore this forbidden interior – rising to my nostrils. The dog would almost certainly sniff it out the moment it returned with its owner. ‘Woof, woof, master! Look at this!’

I made my retreat. Not least because of the disappointments of the morning, I would have liked to embark on a full tour of the house while I was there. Mostly, I would have loved to remain, in hiding, and see the shock and bafflement on the man’s face when he returned. But I did have a business to run. I exited carefully, leaving a leaflet stuck in the letterbox. The wind had dropped, and with some satisfaction I retraced my steps up Boselle, posting leaflets also at the houses on the way back to the car, then drove back to my flat where I popped the key safely away. Sweet success.

But, I hear you ask, with some scepticism (and with that gun to my head) … of all the many splendid houses you’ve sold in your seventeen years in the business, you just happened to have the key to
that
particular one? To which I would answer, of course not – I have the keys to them all.

I
AM SIX YEARS OLD
, and the things I know to be true are dissolving. The rooms have become quiet. The talking is elsewhere – my mother and father, my aunt. At night my mother kisses me, but says little. The book of rhymes she reads to me lies unfinished. My father comes home from his office. He and my mother eat dinner while I count the coins in my moneybox or watch TV in my pyjamas. Look at me, cross-legged, my ears sticking out, a glass of milk before me. Riley purrs and closes his eyes when I stroke him between the ears. These are many days rolled into one, but sometimes the memory is singular and sharp: the rough of the dark curtain on my cheek as I stand hidden, the smell of my mother’s cigarette. I discover where they speak in low voices. They are wherever they think I am not. I lie squeezed beneath the sofa with a piece of bread, or behind the wicker chair in the garden room. I watch my mother touch her stomach where her baby lives. Here I am an invisible boy. When my mother is lying down, my father will not allow me in the dark room. Riley comes and goes. Sometimes I follow when my mother is asleep and creep beneath the bed.

Another time, Aunt Lillian is speaking in a low voice to my father. Her hand is on his, making my breathing stop.

Uncle Richard takes me out to the football, with its uproar and smell of fried onions. On the way home, he stops the car and the lady takes us upstairs to her house. It’s strange to go upstairs to a house. The room is small. ‘This is William,’ Uncle Richard says to the lady, ruffling my hair. I am left alone in the room. The television is on, but when I have eaten my biscuit I go into the kitchen. It’s smaller than the kitchen at our house and there are damp clothes hanging to dry. In the drawer I find a blue-and-white spoon. It is made of what cups are made of. One day, the lady will say ‘Who has taken my spoon?’ and the answer will be, Mister Nobody.

Later still, I am a missing child. I hear them call my name – my father, my aunt, my cousin. Soon, even our new neighbours are out looking for me. But I am snuggled down in the marshmallow-coloured velvet ottoman that stands at the foot of the bed my father now shares with Aunt Lillian. From my place among the blankets, I can hear voices in the street. In my mouth is a sweet I have taken from the jar. The house is silent. A long time goes by, though there is still light in the summer sky. Perhaps I have been asleep. When my father returns with the constable and Mr Damato, the Italian man from across the road, I am sitting on the front step reading my book. ‘Where have you been?’ my father demands. I blink in a way my father sometimes calls impertinent. ‘Nowhere.’ I refuse to satisfy them with more. He shakes me by the shoulder and the constable looks stern. Aunt Lillian comes rushing out, as if they have found me dead. Some days later, the newspaper has a picture of my unsmiling face. It says, ‘Joyful William Heming, eight, safe at home after his mystery disappearance.’ My cousin Isobel is thirteen. She is
rubbing my nose in the newspaper because of all the trouble I have caused. ‘You are nothing but trouble,’ she hisses.

One afternoon when Isobel is fifteen and I am ten, she finds me standing in her wardrobe and screams the house down. All I am doing is being as quiet as a mouse. What is her problem? But now I am in worse trouble. ‘I wasn’t spying on her,’ I tell Aunt Lillian, when she accuses me of spying on her (even with my eye to the crack, I could hardly see her face as she sang along to the pop tunes and painted her toenails), but she just glares at me with her mouth open. ‘Look, he has my comb!’ cries Isobel, and snatches it out of my hand. My father is furious and he cannot help but deliver me two or three sharp smacks about the head. He puts me in my own wardrobe and locks the door. ‘We’ll see how you like that,’ he says. In fact, I don’t mind at all.

In the dark I take out my moneybox key and dig a line in the wood, and then another above it. This will be my mark and no one else’s, hidden here for ever. The space between the lines is as wide as my finger, which is perfect. I imagine crawling into the space and lying very still.

Isobel will not find me again. But her things are often mysteriously moved around or missing – her cotton-wool sticks and perfumed things. One time she sees me watching her kissing a boy from the lane, his arms around the back of her neck. She is furious. Now, every time she kisses a boy – there is more than one – she thinks I am there. She is always looking out for me, but I am hidden. If I wanted, I could just step out from the shadows in the park, like a spectre.

Across the street from my bedroom window I see Mrs Damato, busy with dinner. The kitchen looks bright and steamed up. How I’d love to be down there, behind the door in her pantry, hedged among the jars and strong-smelling packages and the sausages
hanging like stiff arms from the ceiling. I crept in, though she knows nothing of this, during the long holiday, when the weather was hot and the kitchen door had been left open for the breeze. Mrs Damato was vacuuming upstairs. Her little boy, Anthony, was playing in his playpen in the sitting room. Little Anthony saw me and scrambled to his feet when I came in. I waved to him, like an angel just landed. He was still standing at the bars of his cage when I came out. There were cakes still warm on a wire rack, so I took one and gave him half. The drone of the vacuum cleaner stopped abruptly and we both looked at the ceiling. We could hear Mrs Damato up there, warbling on in her high Italian voice.

These are the days I remember. After the troubles with cousin Isobel, my father sent me to a school far from Norfolk. It was an opportunity, he said. My mother had left money when she died, and he said that I had to try hard for her. Even then I knew a line when I heard one. In fact I had more brains than I needed to succeed, but never quite the heart. Instead, I worked at my camouflage. I took care to avoid the extremes of triumph and failure, kept my head down in class, endured enough knocks in play to escape the casual torments of the large-thighed sporty boys, who ruled the house under the neglectful myopic gaze of our house-parent, Mrs Luckham. I shunned cliques, laughed when the others laughed, shrank from the scrutiny of masters. Neither in nor out, I cultivated a middling, willing sociability, waiting my turn, playing my part. But when, once or twice a term, I feigned mild illness or injury, it was not (as with other boys) with a view to skipping afternoon games or PE, but to secure a half-hour of freedom in which to walk the creaky, waxed corridors of Winter House or Bentham or Wood, drawn by the odour of unattended,
unlocked dorms – familiar as my own in basic décor, layout and dimensions but redolent with the aura of their legitimate, absent residents. Now that was what I called an opportunity.

I hadn’t much of significance to say to my fellow pupils, and vice versa, but I came to know them, or a good sum of them, through their comic books and collectables and playthings, and the letters and cards from mothers and siblings and generous godparents whose gifts of money and sweets were accompanied by witty, affectionate greetings and exhortations to prosper and enjoy life. I winkled out their secrets – their family nicknames, who among them had had an appendix or tonsils out, who was going skiing that winter, which family had a Jack Russell (picture enclosed) called Dobb, who had a new baby sister, who needed to be reminded to use their asthma inhaler. Occasionally there would be an unimaginative diary to pore over; the same tattered November issue of
Penthouse
turned up in several locations during the spring term of Year 10. I filled a spiral notebook with my findings and conjectures (Tomerton was gay, I surmised; Faulkes’s stammer was the product of torture as a child), spilling into two notebooks, which became three, four, five and more as my enterprise gathered weight. I kept their lives, all of them – the weaklings, the bullies, the dolts, the young Mozarts and Einsteins – locked in my chest.

Was it too wild to think of it as a hobby? An obsessive sport? Even accounting for the allure of
Penthouse
, it was as exhilarating a thing as a boy could experience to be given a few moments alone in a cave of forbidden treasures. A sharp eye might have noticed me leaving the table before pudding, or slipping out of the library during free study. I wasn’t complacent. My impulses were supported by risk assessment. I planned. I made exit strategies. I could trot out a well-rehearsed line to
explain – to a cleaner or half-interested passing master – why I was where I oughtn’t to be. But, of course, danger was part of the appeal. What is life without the unexpected crash of something to remind us of how the rug can be pulled from under you in an instant? At assembly Mr Williams read out a mesmerizing report in the
Yorkshire Post
of a local young man who had plunged to his death from a mountain in the Lake District. The whole town, he said, was in mourning for a lost son. My fellow pupils fell into an uncomfortable, shuffling silence, but I thought immediately of my own heedless self, walking my own ledge, beset by bracing winds above the abyss of sudden discovery – a kindred, fearless presence in the shadow of the glorious, remembered lost son. We did it – the lost son and I – because it was there, and because we both knew it felt like nothing else on earth.

In the lower sixth, and very nearly grown-up, some of us had our own room and a lockable study, though it was the work of a moment to lift a key – sometimes a small bunch on a novelty ring, with their promise of a secret something squirrelled away in a tin or wooden box – from the pocket of a blazer hanging in a changing room or on the back of a chair, or lying on the playing fields at lunch break, its contents half spilt on the grass. Hurrying to the victim’s quarters, I could then safely give myself up to ten minutes’ judicious foraging or just spend the time absorbing the rays of an alien atmosphere. There was often something to eat. Only on two occasions was I interrupted by the occupant returning unexpectedly – the rattle of the door handle, a muttered ‘
Shit …
’ as the boy searched again for his key, then the echo of his footsteps as he retreated to the school office to face the wrath of Mrs Blake, the senior housekeeper. These were moments to test the nerve, though Mrs Blake was slow to
acknowledge a careless adolescent’s sense of urgency, and by the time she had followed him grimly back to his room with a master key, his own was safely in her lost-property basket, miraculously restored by an unknown hand. I carved my mark everywhere you couldn’t see, everywhere I shouldn’t be.