Rattling the Bones (2 page)

It was unfortunate that a couple of tourists were passing at the time I spoke and because Edna was always a trifle hard of hearing, or affected to be, I had uttered the words loudly.

The tourists looked at me aghast and hurried on.

I got a reaction from Edna at last. ‘No,’ she muttered.

‘Yes, you do, Edna. Oh, come on, don’t sulk, please!’

She changed her mind. She looked up at me, her sunken eyes gleaming with mischief. ‘Yes, of course I remember you, my dear. How are you? What do you want?’

Her voice had always been extraordinary, totally at odds with her dishevelled appearance. It was quite deep and beautifully modulated, undeniably posh. Proper posh, I mean, not put on. I trained to be an actor and I know about voices. Once you heard Edna speak, she wasn’t the same elderly down-at-heel bag lady. In the old Rotherhithe days I’d seen coppers, who had tried to move her on, change their attitude and tone immediately once they heard her.

I still am an actor, by the way. I might be ‘resting’ and I might fill in the time with odd jobs and a bit of detection, but I haven’t given up my dream.

‘I don’t want anything,’ I said, ‘only to say hullo and glad to see you.’ I noticed she had no bags with her. ‘Where are you living?’ I asked.

‘In a hostel,’ said Edna with disgust. ‘They put me in a hostel. First of all they put me in a home with a lot of old people all sitting round a television. The wretched contraption kept on flickering in a way that hurt your eyes and blaring out its nonsense fit to deafen you. Mind you, some of the old folk were already deaf and the others were asleep all the time. I wasn’t going to stay there, I told them that straight. So then they put me in the hostel. It’s no better except that they don’t make you watch that dratted box. But half the people there are bonkers and they don’t allow any animals! I don’t need
people
. I like
animals
.’

The last words were spoken fiercely.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I expect you miss the cats.’

‘They took ’em away.’ Edna was in full spate now, moved by remembered anger. She flapped her arms and shuffled her feet in frustration and looked as though she was making doomed attempts at lift-off, although more like some stranded and bedraggled bird oil-smeared on a beach than anything as sleek as a rocket.

‘Something that called itself a cat charity took ’em, after chasing them all over the churchyard and trapping them in nasty little boxes. How could it be a charity? It took them from their home and from me. I looked after them.’ She abandoned the attempt to levitate, sidled a little closer and her faded eyes glinted up at me conspiratorially. ‘You know what they did with the cats? They did away with them, that’s what.
Murdered ’em
.’

‘Perhaps they rehoused them?’ I suggested.

Edna showed that there was a difference between living in a parallel universe and not having your mind in working order. ‘Rehoused the kittens, maybe,’ she said sternly. ‘The older cats, no. They weren’t house-trained, they were used to roaming free and they were too old to change their ways.’

‘Right,’ I said.

I was glad she was as sharp as ever she had been beneath that skilful pretence of battiness. If she had still been living in the old people’s home, sitting hour after hour before the television set, I doubted that her mind would still be in such good order. Hostel living might not suit her taste but in some ways it had benefited her. She was distinctly cleaner, skin washed and pink, clothes tattered but not whiffy, and she appeared generally better nourished.

She cheered up and uttered an unexpected cackle of laughter. ‘They rehoused me, that’s what they did, just like the kits. But I’m no kitten. I’m one of the old ’uns, too old to change my ways.’

She shook her head and looked baleful again. ‘I don’t hang around that hostel. It smells of baked beans. I spend my days walking round,’ she concluded in a satisfied tone, ‘like I always did.’

But obviously she had not always done. Once, decades ago, Edna had had a different life. I wondered how much of it she remembered and how much she had consciously suppressed. But she hadn’t finished yet.

‘They even took the old tom.’ She returned to the topic of the cats. ‘He led them a merry chase before they trapped him with a bit of meat. I hope he scratched them all. He had a grand set of claws and his teeth were good ’uns. He’d crunch up mice bones like they were made of jelly.’ Her expression and tone became wistful, ‘He went down fighting, that’s what he did. They should have put me down with him.’

‘I’ve got a flat, now,’ I told her. I made myself sound as cheery as possible because she was grumpy and seemed still so upset about the cats. ‘It’s in a house that belongs to a charity that provides cheap housing for people like me. There are seven flats and a garden of a sort at the back. It’s really nice. Come and visit me.’

‘I might leave my card,’ said Edna vaguely, drifting off to that other world, or appearing to do so. It was her way of refusing the invitation. She returned disconcertingly to the present. ‘How is your young man?’

‘You mean Ganesh,’ I said. ‘He’s not my young man. He’s a friend. He’s very well. He works for his uncle now, a newsagent.’

Ganesh’s parents had run a greengrocer’s shop in Rotherhithe but they’d been dispersed in the same way as the rest of us and had relocated to High Wycombe. Ganesh had been left behind and scooped up by another family member to be enrolled in another business. I know Ganesh objects to being passed round the family in this way but at the same time, he seems unable to break away from it. It comes under the heading of things that Ganesh Will Not Discuss.

‘I was engaged to be married once,’ said Edna in a conversational tone.

Used as I was to the ‘hop, skip and a jump’ way in which Edna thought, this was so unexpected I took a step back and wondered if I’d heard her correctly. Edna had never ever volunteered any personal information or even given a sign her previous life meant anything to her or that she even had any recollection of it.

I looked down at her, studying her more closely. It was impossible to tell how she had once looked. The general shape of her face was round but her chin was pointed. Heart-shaped, they call that. Only in Edna’s case the whole thing had sagged. Her eyebrows had fallen out and were represented only by a sparse scattering of grey hairs. She’d compensated by growing a few hairs on her chin. Her eyes were deep-set and heavy-lidded and the eyelashes had gone the way of the eyebrows. Yet I noticed for the first time that her skin was very fine, like a piece of crumpled silk. Perhaps she had once been a very pretty youngster with a heart-shaped face, flawless skin and long eyelashes and someone had fallen in love with her.

Her brow wrinkled into a furrow. I thought at first she frowned because I was studying her so closely and so rudely. But it was because she was rummaging in her mind.

‘I think I was,’ she said, less certainly. ‘I’m almost positive I was. Who could it have been, I wonder?’

Her gaze drifted past me and sharpened. Her whole expression and attitude changed. Panic crossed her features. Her eyes glittered with fear and their gaze darted about like a trapped animal’s.

‘I’m going!’ she said.

She shuffled sideways and in a burst of unexpected speed outmanoeuvred me. I darted after her scurrying figure and caught her arm.

‘Edna? What’s wrong?’

‘Can’t stay!’ she said irritably. ‘Go away!’

Edna twitched her sleeve from my grip and made off, burrowing her way through the crowds like a demented mole. She rounded the corner where the Kentish Town Road meets Camden High Street and wobbled off along the Kentish Town Road until she was lost to sight among the pedestrians and traffic.

I let her go and turned back to the Camden High Street, looking round to see what on earth could have spooked her like that.

The usual hustle and bustle went on around me, images flickering and changing like a kaleidoscope pattern. But no, not every shape moved. One thing, or rather one person, was stationary.

He was standing diagonally across the road, on the far side of the traffic island, on the corner of Parkway in the shade thrown by the frontage of a bank. He was the kind of person you probably wouldn’t notice in the ordinary way of things but once you had noticed him, his image imprinted itself on your brain like a snapshot.

I can see him now in my mind’s eye, lurking in the shadows, pressed against the bank’s respectable wall. It was as if he was anxious to remain unnoticed but, if noticed, hoped to gain some legitimacy from the business behind him. Everything about him was pale and so still that he looked just a little bit ghost-like. I could see he appeared young, fairly tall and spindly in build and I got the impression of a skin untouched by sunshine even though we’d had quite a lovely hot summer. His clothes were either white or very pale; at a distance I couldn’t be sure which. He wore knee-length shorts with large square buttoned pockets on the sides of the legs. With them he wore a white T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and a white cap with a sharp peak, more like a tennis cap than a baseball cap. He was staring towards the Tube station entrance and me. As soon as he realised I had noticed him, he reacted as quickly as Edna had done, turning and disappearing round the corner, in his case into Parkway, taking him away from the area in the opposite direction to that taken by Edna.

He should have stayed where he was. I would probably just have dismissed him as one more oddity. Camden High Street is full of eccentric characters. Even if I’d thought he looked a bit suspicious I could have done nothing about it. If I’d marched over there before he slipped away and accused him of watching me and Edna, he could well have replied that I was off my trolley and he was waiting for a mate. Quite possibly he would have tried to sell me drugs. His whole body language spoke guilt but I decided quickly it couldn’t be because he was a pusher and I doubted he was an undercover cop. Drugs Squad turns up in all shapes and disguises but they always look like cops. Partly it’s their standard of physical fitness and very straight posture. They never look relaxed.

No one would ever mistake me for anyone official. I’m too short, relaxed to a fault, and anyone can see I’m the type usually at odds with authority. This is not by my choice, I might add. It’s just the way things have worked out.

I act on instinct and it’s not always wise, as my friend Ganesh is fond of pointing out. But I was never one for standing around watching life go by. I want to grab it by the throat. So I took advantage of a gap in the traffic and dashed across the road in pursuit of Ghostly Apparition. I wanted to ask him what his game was and I needed to see where he was going for my own satisfaction. Call it curiosity, call it meddling, call it what you like.

By the time I got into Parkway he was well ahead of me, walking quickly and purposefully with his arms swinging. In a way I was relieved to see him. At least he was real. I can move, too. I scooted along and came level with him, out of breath and probably red in the face. He knew I was there, knew I’d followed him, but he gave no sign of it other than lengthening his stride. His paleness was now even more apparent. I wondered if he’d been ill that his skin had that fish-belly translucence. His eyes were fixed in a rigid blank stare, apparently seeing nothing, making no contact with anything. I did wonder for a moment if he was schizophrenic and, if so, if he was taking his pills. That was a worry. The only thing I could be sure of was that, without breaking into a trot, he was definitely running away. I wondered if he was making for Regent’s Park. There he could break openly into a jog and soon leave me behind.

Even this power-walking was doing me in. I struggled for the breath to hail him and managed to croak, ‘Hey!’ but too late.

Without warning, he wheeled right into Gloucester Avenue and almost immediately right again into Gloucester Crescent. His legs were long and his stride correspondingly so. My legs had to work double time to match his progress. I did my best, wondering, as my breathing became more laboured, how I got to be so out of condition. I pursued him past the curve of expensive homes in the Crescent. That’s how it is in Camden: the wealthy and the homeless are jumbled up together in a unique ecosystem.

We proceeded at such speed that before I knew it, we were at the top of Inverness Street and he had turned into it. Here the fruit and veg market was busy. My quarry had lengthened his stride even more so that I dog-trotted along gasping in his wake like a fairy-tale character chasing someone wearing seven-league boots. I skidded on squashed fruit. I dodged shopping baskets trailed by doughty old dears heedless whose shins they cracked. Little kids, in and out of buggies, littered my way ahead.

The man in white had led me round in a circle and we emerged, he still that tantalising distance ahead, into Camden High Street once more. Too late I saw his purpose. He ran across the road and disappeared into Camden Town Market. I realised he was clever and I’d been caught out.