Risking It All (11 page)

I told him we were well into afternoon and heading towards evening. This early in the year the light was fading by five.

‘Good heavens,’ said Norman. ‘How time flies.’

He sounded and looked, with the striped pants, like a butler who’d lost his post without references after being found in
flagrante delicto
with a parlourmaid and was now in sadly reduced circumstances. ‘I haven’t finished yet,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got the
Guardian
.’ A peevish note entered his voice.

Every day Norman set out with a plastic bin bag to collect up discarded newspapers; hence his nickname. He didn’t want just newsprint in bulk. He wanted one fairly clean and absolutely complete copy of each title. He included everything: the broadsheets, the tabloids, the local press. He set out early each morning, roamed the railway termini (good places, he’d told me, for discarded papers), bus shelters and parks. Top of his list was a copy of
The Times
in which no one had done the crossword. When he’d got them all, he took them home and filed them. Well, filing is too grand a word. He packed them tidily in boxes. The ground floor of his house was stacked with boxes of newspapers, all date-marked with felt-tip pen. The first floor was let out to tenants. The tenants probably worried about sleeping above all that combustible material, but Norman was their landlord, and the tenants were generally the sort of people who didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. The house, from the outside, looked about to fall down. Norman had inherited it from his parents. He’d lived there all his life. If what might once have been a hobby had grown into an obsession, so what? Norman was a man satisfied with his lot.

Only not so satisfied at the moment, owing to the absence of a copy of that day’s
Guardian
.

‘Hari may still have one at the shop,’ I said.

But at this Norman looked sly and pointed out that he’d have to pay for it, wouldn’t he, then?

We made our way down the street into the lengthening shadows, side by side.

‘You still living in that garage?’ he asked me suddenly.

That’s another thing about Norman. You’d think he has no interest in anything but the national press. But he generally has a pretty good idea of what’s about.

I told him I was.

‘I’ve a back room available,’ he said. ‘Very nice. Looks out on to the garden. A room with a view, as you might say.’

I’d seen Norman’s garden, full of long grass, tangled bushes, an old privy festooned with ivy and inhabited, he claimed, by an owl, broken domestic appliances and rats. I’d also glimpsed from time to time some of Norman’s other tenants as they crept furtively back and forth. The company of the rats would have been preferable. I thanked him and declined the offer. He wasn’t offended. We parted company at the corner of the street. Norman went in further search of the
Guardian
. I went back to the shop.

Hari was in the storeroom and Ganesh was alone, resting his forearms on the counter and reading
Personal Computer World
. His long hair was secured with an elastic band but a bit of it had escaped and hung down by his cheek. He was studying all the technology on offer intently and would have made a good model for someone like Rodin if he’d wanted to knock out another
Thinker
. Ganesh hasn’t actually got a computer, in case this obsession of his with computer magazines should make you think otherwise. The only technology around the place is the lottery ticket terminal and the till. But Jay, his brother-in-law, is seriously into the Internet and Ganesh is feeling a bit left out. He looked up.

‘Where’ve you been all day?’ he asked

‘I had a bit of business to attend to,’ I told him with dignity.

Ganesh looked disapproving and heaved a sigh. ‘If you think I don’t know what you’re up to, Fran, you’re wrong.’

I must have looked startled, because I didn’t see how he could know if I hadn’t told him.

‘You needn’t look so scared,’ he went on. ‘I don’t know exactly what it is, of course I don’t. Because you’re keeping all your cards close to your chest, aren’t you? But it’s something that will get you into trouble, and when it does, you’ll come running to me to help you out of it.’

‘I hate it when you’re smug,’ I told him.

‘So I’m right!’ he crowed.

‘I didn’t say that. I just said – forget it. If you want to know, I went down to the housing department.’ He had raised his eyebrows, so I shook my head and added, ‘No luck.’ He grunted. ‘Gan,’ I ventured, ‘has Rennie Duke been around here again, like this evening?’

He shrugged. ‘Haven’t seen him.’

‘Have you seen a car like his?’

‘No. How could I, stuck in here?’ This was accompanied by a glower towards the back room, from which came scraping and rustling noises, indicating that Hari was busy about some kind of stock-taking exercise. Ganesh had probably been manning the fort most of the day.

I told him I’d see him later. I went through to the back room. Bonnie jumped up from her cardboard bed and went bonkers welcoming me. Hari greeted me more sedately from the top of his stepladder. I scooped up the wriggling Bonnie and made for the yard door and my garage home before Hari could ask me any questions, like, how much longer was I going to be there. How was I to know? It was beginning to look like indefinitely.

In the circumstances I had decided it might not be the best thing to eat with Hari and Ganesh in the flat that evening. However, Ganesh, who pretty well always guesses how my mind is working, came down to the garage when they’d shut up shop at eight, and suggested we went out for a bite to eat. We ended up in Reekie Jimmie’s baked spud café because it was near at hand, certainly not because Jimmie’s baked potatoes were anything your average gastronome would want to write about. The best you could say about it was that it was warm in there. In fact there was a real old fug, what with the odours of cooking and hot greasy dishwater, to say nothing of the smell of the fags Jimmie nipped out to smoke in the corridor behind the counter area, the smoke from which seeped in through the half-open door. That evening he had on offer the usual four fillings: vegetarian (baked beans); chilli (baked beans with a token amount of meat); cheese (rubbery); tuna with sweetcorn (a lot of sweetcorn and very little fish). Gan asked for vegetarian and I had the tuna, even though all that sweetcorn tended to give me wind.

‘Haven’t seen you in a while, hen,’ said Jimmie reproachfully, ladling beans over a blackened spud.

We muttered excuses and carried our potatoes to the far corner, which took us out of Jimmie’s orbit but put us directly under the piped music.

‘When are you thinking of going to see your mother again?’ Gan asked. ‘Only I’ve got to let Dilip know if I want to borrow his car.’

‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ I said. I could at least let her know that I’d an address for the Wildes. Pity it was so far away. This was an exercise requiring time and money, and I was short of both.

We made conversation on a variety of subjects, skirting round the one uppermost in my mind and Gan’s suspicions that I was getting into something over my head, as usual.

Business had slowed. Jimmie left his counter and drifted towards us. He wore checked chef’s pants and a whitish jacket. His hair must once have been red but had paled to a speckled grey and hamster ginger. Rumours about Jimmie were numerous, but you couldn’t check any of them. He was said to be an ex-bank robber, to have two wives and several children in Scotland, to have played professional football, and, the most unlikely, to be a criminal mastermind who used the spud café as a front. This I found hard to believe, because he spent most of his time in the café, and if you had any money, would you do that? I suspected the rumours were started by Jimmie himself just to keep the punters coming in.

He seated himself uninvited. ‘All right?’ he enquired.

We took this as wanting to know if the food had been satisfactory and assured him it had. Well, it had been as good as we’d expected it would be, which was not very, but then you couldn’t say it had failed expectations either.

Jimmie leaned forward to impart a confidence. ‘Spuds have gone out of fashion, you know, hen. Right, aye?’ He nodded towards Ganesh.

Ganesh, appealed to as an authority on the capital’s eating habits, said cautiously, ‘Depends.’

‘No, no, you take it from me. I’ve been thinking of turning this place into a pizza joint, you know?’

At the thought of the same spud fillings spread on pizza bases, I probably blanched. ‘There are a lot of pizza places about, Jimmie,’ I said. ‘At least this place is – is different.’

‘Aye, but that’s because they’re popular!’ he returned wistfully. ‘That’s what the public wants. I thought, mebbe paint the place up, make it look a wee bit Eye-talian. Hang some of those fancy bottles on the walls. Table service. You wanting a job?’ This was aimed at me.

I said I was always wanting a job. I didn’t think he was serious, so there was no harm in going along with his plans. We all have dreams.

‘Right then,’ he said, getting up. ‘I’ll remember.’

I didn’t sleep very well that night. The sweetcorn was intent on reminding me why I usually avoided it. I don’t know why I chose it. No one but myself to blame, as usual. But then, cheese or baked beans can play havoc with the digestion as well. If you want a good night’s sleep, don’t eat at Reekie Jimmie’s.

I dozed off eventually, even so. Bonnie woke me in the early hours, as she’d done before, growling softly. She was standing near my head. I put out a hand and it touched her. The hair on her spine was rigid. She gave my fingers a quick lick, just to let me know I wasn’t the object of her growling, then rumbled threateningly again.

A car had turned into the blind driveway where the garages stood. Perhaps one of the other garage owners? The engine was switched off. But I heard no squeak of neighbouring garage doors opening. I listened hard. Someone was walking up and down outside. Not running as on the previous occasion I’d heard someone there. Just walking, pausing, walking on. At last, before my locked doors, the footsteps stopped.

I sat up, swung my legs to the floor, scooped up Bonnie and clamped a hand on her muzzle.

I was just in time. A faint tapping was heard at the door. Bonnie wriggled and uttered a muffled squeak. I whispered, ‘Shh . . .’ She froze.

The tapping sounded again, louder. I heard a voice, a man’s voice. It was muffled, but I could have sworn it called my name.

This was all wrong. Anyone who knew I lived in the garage probably knew I came and went through the back door into the yard. I never used the main garage doors. Besides, who’d want to talk to me now, at this time of the night, or early morning? Not having any windows, I couldn’t tell what time it was. I put hearing my name down to nerves. In the circumstances, I was ready to imagine anything. It was probably no more than one of those lost souls who’d taken the turning into the blind roadway and was wandering about, looking for a way out. I was getting fed up with this. Perhaps Gan and I could nail up a board reading
Garages Only
.

Then the door shivered as an unknown hand rattled at the catch. In my arms, Bonnie felt as though she was about to burst out of her skin with frustration. Neither of us had imagined that.

The footsteps moved away. I heard a car door slam. I waited for the engine to start up but it didn’t. I couldn’t work this out and I didn’t like it. For a long time I sat there, with Bonnie on my knees, listening and waiting. She, too, waited and listened. Then she stiffened. I couldn’t hear anything new, but she had. I strained my ears. Was that a footstep? Or just a piece of debris blown in by the wind and rattling its way past all the garages? There was another sound, sudden and unexpected, a kind of yelp. I wasn’t sure it was even human. It could have been a human voice, cut short. Or it might have come from some kind of animal, hunting out there in the gloom. There were several feral cats around the area. It could even have been Norman’s owl. Without warning, making me almost jump out of my skin, a car horn blared a brief, shocking fanfare, splitting the night air. It was followed by a scraping noise and a clunk. Someone, something, was panting. And then, whatever it was, or had been, was gone.

How I knew it had gone I couldn’t tell you, but I knew it had, and Bonnie knew it, too. I released her. She dropped to the ground and ran towards the closed double doors. But there she stopped, and barked a couple of times in an experimental way, before beginning to whine and scratch at them. I switched on the garage light. The fluorescent tube buzzed and flickered into white light. Bonnie, by the doors, turned to look at me enquiringly. Then she scrabbled some more at the doors, whined and looked back at me again.