Runaway (43 page)

They followed the wall along the front of the building, ignoring the main door, until they reached a rusted wrought-iron gate that blocked the way into a narrow alley leading down the side of the building to a service door accessed through a brick archway. On the other side of a broken-down railing, the gardens lay brooding darkly in their leafy neglect.

Dave tried the handle of the gate, and it swung inwards with a creak of rusting hinges. The alleyway was littered with debris. Bricks and broken glass, bits of a dismembered doll, the ragged remains of a coat, the skeleton of an umbrella, a single, soggy trainer.

Luke drew a torch from his jacket pocket and shone it into darkness, picking out the detritus of decades of abandonment. They stepped carefully through it to a black-painted door beyond the arch. It was padlocked.

‘No way in here,’ Luke said.

‘Aye, there is.’ Dave’s voice boomed out of the dark. ‘Gimme that torch a wee minute.’

And he took the torch from Luke’s hand and made his way back along the alley, before turning the light and his attention towards the broken fence. It took him less than two minutes to break one of the palings free of its rusted anchor and return, brandishing it triumphantly.

‘Okay, light the lock for me. A wee leaf oot of Jeff’s book here.’

He thrust the torch back at Luke, and in the circle of its light slipped the paling through the loop of the padlock and braced himself against the door with his foot. Years of bending pipework, and hefting baths and sinks and toilet bowls, had built muscle in his arms and shoulders that was still there and still strong.

But in the end it wasn’t the padlock itself that gave. It was the bracket that fixed the clasp to the door. Wood splintered and cracked in the still of the night and it came away in its entirety, padlock and all.

A flimsy Yale lock then offered no resistance to Dave’s boot as he slammed it into the door once, twice, three times. He stood panting triumphantly as it finally gave, and the door swung into the blackness beyond.

He grinned. ‘Missed ma vocation, eh?’

Maurie snatched Dave’s flat cap from his head and chucked it at him. ‘Here, go and hang that up on the gate, so our friend knows where to get in.’

‘Ma guid bunnet?’ Dave protested.

But Maurie was dismissive. ‘No one’s going to steal your greasy old cap, Dave.’

The darkness beyond the door was full of must and memories, and an all-pervasive reek of damp and decay. Luke led the way through a rubble-strewn hallway, shining the beam of his torch on the floor ahead, then up the narrow service stairs to the landing, which led to the common room and the hall. Here, faded paint on scarred walls bore the faintest traces of the designs once painted on them in shit by the demented Alice.

No one spoke as they all trooped into what had been the common room. A table stood at its centre, white with plaster dust, lumps of broken ceiling strewn across its surface. It might have been the very table they had all sat around in those long-ago days of madness. Luke righted a couple of toppled chairs before swinging the beam of his torch briefly into the old kitchen. An ancient rusted cooker still stood there, its door open and hanging off a broken hinge. Incongruously, a blackened aluminium cooking pot sat on one of the rings, as if waiting for someone to make their morning porridge.

With the others close behind him, he stepped through into the hall itself. A couple of table-tennis tables were half covered by dust sheets. The wooden floor had been marked out in different colours at some time for badminton and basketball. There were hoops mounted on the walls at either end, and old moth-eaten badminton nets lay in a discarded pile at one side.

‘They must have used it as a youth or community centre at some point,’ Jack said. He turned to Maurie. ‘What now?’

‘We wait.’

‘When’s our visitor due?’

Maurie checked his watch. ‘Not for another hour. I wanted to be sure we were here well ahead of time. Who knew how long it might take us to get in?’

_II

Back in the common room they dusted down chairs and sat themselves around the table. But Luke was dubious about how long the batteries in his torch might last, and he went in search of the fuse box to see if there was still power in the hall. The others were left in the dark, sitting at the table and listening to his footsteps as he moved around on the landing and up the stairs.

When he returned, he shook his head. ‘No juice.’

He went into the kitchen and rummaged around in cupboards and drawers before they heard his ‘Aha!’ and he returned with a cardboard box of old candles, some of them half burned, others with pristine waxed wicks.

‘Anyone got a light?’

No one had, and Luke’s smile quickly faded. He laid the candles on the table and went back into the kitchen, returning a few moments later with a renewed smile on his face and a box of matches clutched in his free hand. But they were damp, and old, and one after the other they sparked and sputtered and shed their phosphor, but failed to ignite. Until the second from last, which fizzed and popped before bringing flame to the splinter of wood. Quickly he lit the first candle, and they all grabbed one, lighting each in turn, and setting them on the floor along the walls, fixed in their own molten wax.

Then they sat at the table again, as they had done all those years before, their shadows dancing around the walls to remembered music. Jack recalled all those faces, pale and drawn, many of them bearded, eyes lit by madness, a fug of cigarette smoke and marijuana hanging over them in a cloud. And JP tipped back in his chair at the head of the table, bare feet crossed in front of him, regaling them with tales of insanity and miracle cures, his charm and charisma the single factor that bound and kept the residents of the hall together.

Dust settled around them, along with their silence, and they waited in the flickering darkness with the ghosts of the past, and Jack could almost imagine that Alice was still dancing out there in the hall, slashing the air with her brush, painting their ordinary lives with extraordinary colours. And for just a moment he believed he could actually hear the distant echo of the Kinks playing on that scratchy old Dansette. They had been so tired of waiting back then.

Jack, too, was tired of waiting. He had spent a lifetime wondering what had become of Rachel, and still Maurie was giving nothing away.

‘What the hell was it with you and Rachel?’ he said suddenly.

And Maurie’s eyes flickered towards him.

Although his focus was on Maurie, Jack could feel the tension among the others around the table, like a fist clenching.

‘And don’t tell me it’s none of my business, or that you don’t owe me anything. Not after all these years. Not after everything I’ve been through to get you here.’

Maurie’s expression was bleak. His eyes held Jack’s for only an instant before they slipped away to stare off into some long-buried past. Or perhaps towards a dwindling future that promised nothing but pain and death. Whichever, it brought him little comfort, and Jack saw how his hands bunched into fists on the table in front of him, turning his knuckles white. A physical manifestation of what they all felt.

‘You always wanted us to go to Leeds, didn’t you?’ Jack said. ‘That’s why you had her letter with you. One way or another you’d have talked us into going there and getting her out of that place.’ Jack’s thoughts raked through old coals and found that there was still a glow among the embers. ‘Maybe that’s the only reason you came with us in the first place.’

It was a thought he had never entertained before, and hadn’t seen coming until now. But he saw how it affected the wreck of a man sitting opposite him. Like a physical blow, bringing a hint of pale colour to a dead-white face. Maurie unbunched his fingers and laid them on the table in front of him.

‘I was eleven years old when I found the letter from the Beth Din.’ His voice was thin and reedy, and not much more than a whisper, but somehow it filled the room. ‘I don’t know what my parents had it out for. Maybe the rabbi had asked to see it, I don’t know. But my father had left it on his bedside cabinet. I used to sneak into their bedroom sometimes when they were out, to look at the soft porn magazines he kept hidden under the bed. Which is when I saw it.’

He dragged his eyes away from their focus on his hands, and he looked around the faces silently watching him. And in spite of himself he smiled at their consternation.

‘The Beth Din’s a Jewish court that rules on matters of Judaic law. The letter was marked “Confidential” and addressed to both my parents. The Clerk of the Court was writing to advise them that the Beth Din had established that Maurice Stephen, their adopted son, was of Jewish birth, and that an entry had been made accordingly in the Proceedings Book.’

‘You were adopted?’ Dave said.

Maurie nodded.

‘And you never knew till then?’

‘Nope.’ A sad smile attempted to animate his face but somehow failed. ‘It’s quite a feeling when everything you thought you were and knew falls away from beneath your feet. There were only two things in my head. The first was that they had lied to me. My parents. By omission, perhaps, but it was something they should have told me. I had a right to know.’ He paused, and they all heard his breath rattling in his windpipe. ‘The second was a question. Who the hell was I?’

Jack closed his eyes. There was a sudden clarity in his mind about where this was going, and his thoughts went reeling back through time, like the tumblers in a slot machine, making sense of so much that had made none at the time.

‘What did you do?’

‘I went through all the deed boxes in my father’s study till I found a folder marked “Adoption”. And there it all was. A receipt from Renfrew County Council children’s department for payment of fees due in the legal adoption of Maurice Stephen Cohen. Five pounds and five shillings. Or five guineas. That’s what it cost them to buy me. Cheap at the price, wouldn’t you say?’

His bitter little laugh turned into a cough, and it took almost a full minute for him to bring it under control.

Finally he said, ‘But there was other stuff. Personal correspondence between my father and a woman who ran a hotel and restaurant in the Gorbals. Smith’s Hotel. Though I guess the Smith was probably a corruption of Schmitt. It was famous in the years after the war, a gathering point for the Jewish community. Any Jew arriving in Glasgow would end up there. And Isa Smith was a sort of godmother to the whole community. My mother, my adoptive mother, worked there as a bookkeeper. It was Isa who arranged the adoption.’

His eyes wandered off again to some distant past.

‘I knew the place. My mother took me often, and I would eat in the kitchen. There was an older woman who worked there. Always made such a fuss of me. Serving me little treats, kissing me on the forehead. Always with a gift for me on my birthday. Turned out she was my grandmother. My blood grandmother. Her daughter had got herself pregnant. Unmarried. Just a teenager. And in those days it was common for unmarried mothers to give up their babies for adoption. Only she didn’t want to. She wanted to keep that baby. Me.’

And for a moment it seemed as if Maurie would be overwhelmed by emotion.

He swallowed hard. ‘But she’d never have managed to keep it without the help of her mother. And then the stupid girl gets herself pregnant again, almost immediately. Not even by the same man. And her mother tells her she can’t look after two babies, and that the second one will have to be adopted.’ He shook his head. ‘But before she even got the choice she went and died in childbirth, and there was no way her mother could cope. It was Isa’s idea to put us both up for adoption.’ He refocused to meet the gaze of his old friends. ‘Me and Rachel.’

Luke’s voice was hushed. ‘She was your half-sister.’

Maurie nodded. ‘My adoptive mother and her sister were both older women. Neither of them had been able to conceive. Something genetic, probably. So I went to one, and Rachel to the other. The perfect solution. Kept us both in the same family. Except that my aunt had wanted me, a boy, but drew the short straw and got Rachel.’

‘Did Rachel know?’ Jack’s voice was so quiet as to be almost inaudible. ‘I mean, about being adopted.’

‘Not until I told her. And then it was our secret. One we swore to keep always. Just the two of us. Our parents never knew that we knew. I had confronted the woman who worked in the kitchen at Smith’s. My real grandmother. She couldn’t deny me anything. Least of all the truth. And I think, in the end, she wanted me to know. She broke down and told me the whole sordid tale, but made me swear never to tell a soul. Which, apart from Rachel, I haven’t until now.’

Maurie’s eyes dipped to the table, then rose slowly to seek Jack’s. ‘She had too much of her mother in her. I was scared –’