A Death to Remember (6 page)

‘
My memory being so rotten, I’ll let you pick the place.’

‘
Oh, I’d already decided that,’ she told me blandly, but there was fun in her eyes.

I
walked away from my old office with no regrets. Usually, on retirement, there’s a bit of a party and handshakes and all the emotional stuff that charges the nostalgia batteries and leaves you miserable for the next month. I hadn’t had that. I could turn my back on it without glancing back. The only item of interest in that building was coming out with me for dinner. I had a bet with myself that she’d choose the Swan at Mecklin.

Reaching
Rock Street required a bus on the same route as I’d used to come into town, as it was the other side of the pool from Pool Street Motors. I didn’t call in to see what they were doing with my car.

Along
Rock Street was the old entrance gate to the flower-pot factory. Beyond it, and above the surrounding walls, the tops of the kilns were still visible, but all that ground was now derelict because the new factory fronted onto the main Mecklin road, and was all hum but no fumes. The terraced run of houses had been built for the original factory employees. All they’d had to do was cross the street and they’d be there. Grand for them in the bad weather, but it left them short of excuses for being late. Nowadays they commuted. The car park was larger than the whole of the original factory. Progress, that was.

The
terraces were a straight, flat run of roofing, only varying as the rise of the road dictated. Every sixth house, there was a tunnel to a rear alleyway along the back. The fronts were level with the pavement. There were three floors to each house, the rooms one behind the other. Very soon it would all fall down, unless the bulldozers got there first. Two-thirds had broken windows or boarded ones. The lace curtains here and there meant occupation. They were the signal: knock first before you push me over, I might be in bed.

The
only time I could remember visiting that street was on a FAM fraud case, a man having left his common-law wife and taken her Child Allowance book with him. When I found him, he’d had similar books from five other common-law wives. One way of making a living, I suppose.

I
stood outside number seventeen, and recalled nothing of the visit I must have made. I stood
opposite
number seventeen, rather, and suddenly realised that I would have driven up that day, and not walked. I crossed the street and stood at the front door, and felt a cautious tinkle of memory, like a distant bell. There was something about the wrecked door of the adjoining house, and the grey, tangled drape of the lace curtains at number seventeen, ground floor. One passing year was nothing in the life of those curtains. I went up the two steps and pushed open the front door.

No
locks on these fronts doors, no need. There would be bedsitters in the six or so available rooms, the old kitchen at the back no more, now, than a musty shell. Seventeen A and B downstairs, I knew, seventeen C and D on the next floor. The wooden stairs were bare and creaking. I turned right at the top. And stopped. How did I know to turn right? But there it was, painted dimly on the door. 17C.

It
was very slightly ajar.

I
told myself that he’d heard me coming, and this was a welcome. My tap was more of a push, so that the door swung open. The man was standing by the bed with his hands beneath the thin mattress, about to turn it over. He straightened, and turned, no expression on his long, sharp face. He was in his twenties, in jeans and a short black imitation leather jacket with a checked shirt beneath it, a little taller than me, but thinner. I decided I could handle him, then wondered why I’d thought that. It was his lack of expression, I suppose, when I’d have expected at least surprise. But from that lack of expression I knew him, had met him, and equated him with violence.

That
was the trouble. I knew him, but not in that setting. He could not be George Peters.

‘
George Peters?’ I asked, nevertheless.

‘
Who wants him?’

I
knew the voice, too, flat and a little hoarse, giving nothing. It was alien to this room as I knew it, and I did know it. That was strange, that it had altered not at all in more than a year. The bed was the same dilapidated mess, the table plain and its surface greasy, two chairs (upright), one chair (easy, if you could stand the springs and the collapsed seat). A cupboard, a mini-cooker, an electric fire. I knew it. I had been there. George Peters had sat at that table...

‘
The name’s Summers,’ I said. ‘Who’re you?’

He
shrugged, looking round. ‘He ain’t been around for a year or more. Reckon they wanta let the room again, so I come to see if it’d do me.’

‘
And does it?’

He
’d been lying. The room wouldn’t have been left as it was unless the rent had been paid. George Peters might have walked out of there only an hour before. It was exactly as I recalled it.

It
was perhaps the lack of change that crystallised the image. Peters was there, sitting at that table in one of those upright chairs, writing out a statement...

A
statement! I had it clearly, then, in my mind’s eye. Not a short note of withdrawal, but a statement, on a full-size blank minute sheet. I saw him doing it, laboriously, using my fountain pen and cursing it because he was left-handed and the oblique nib was tailored for the right hand.

‘
...what the hell you want here,’ he was saying.

It
was almost a physical pain to withdraw myself from the vision. I didn’t want to lose George Peters.

I
found that I was feeling relaxed, and the style I was using must have been natural to me. The shrug was easy.

‘
Oh...just looked in on the off-chance. I lent him my pen, and forgot to get it back.’

His
lip was curling. ‘Y’ can’t tell me...when was this?’

‘
Over a year ago.’

‘
After all this time...’

You
need to talk them down, quietly, so that they have to listen. ‘It’s a valuable pen, and I’ve been out of circulation, sort of.’

There
was an instant spark in his eye. That meant something to him. What it meant was that I’d been inside. Prison, I mean. Only a certain type of person will jump to that conclusion, and also, as he was doing, begin to relax when reaching it.

‘
I’ll just have a quick look,’ I said.

But
I was too late. He’d stiffened. ‘Heh! I know you.’

So
at last he’d identified me, and it did not please him. Suddenly he didn’t want to be in the same room with Cliff Summers, and yet he didn’t want to leave it. That meant that Cliff Summers had to be the one to leave. Even his expressionless face revealed that. His voice hardened.

‘
You can just bugger off, mate,’ he said. ‘You didn’t leave no bloody pen here, and
he
ain’t here. So bog off, while y’ got the chance.’

And
leave him there? Not likely. I opened the door and stood back. ‘After you.’

‘
Now you look here...’

‘
You’ve got no more right in here than I have, friend. This room isn’t to let, and you know it. Look round you. Do you see a year’s dust? You leave now, or I call the police.’

It
was a bluff, but I had a feeling his aggression was forced. He’d been going over the room, or starting to. If I went for the police, he’d have time to turn the place upside-down and disappear before I’d even found a phone. But I couldn’t leave him in that room, doing it, without even a gesture.

He
looked at me with disgust. This didn’t require any effort towards expression, just a lifted lip and a pathetic spit on a carpet that could take it. Then he walked past me, and stood there while I slammed the door. If he was to leave, he was making sure I didn’t stay.

A
pity. I’d have liked a quiet few minutes with that room, conjuring with the memory of George Peters at the table. Given sufficient relaxed concentration, I might even have remembered exactly what statement he’d been making.

I
had not the slightest doubt that my friend would be heading back to that room as soon as I was out of the way, but there was nothing I could do about it. The door had looked as though it wouldn’t resist the merest hint of a strip of plastic.

I
went home to prepare myself for an evening meal with Nicola. I was living with my Aunt Peg, out on the Liversey Road. I wasn’t too happy about that, because I couldn’t afford to pay her much, so that really she was worse off than she’d have been if I hadn’t been there. This worried me, but she’d have been upset if I’d suggested moving. In fact, I had a suspicion she was glad I was in a weak financial position and couldn’t afford to leave her. But my aunt was never demonstrative, like all my mother’s family, and any affection we had for each other had to be hidden behind a cloak of decorum. In her case, it was a constant, purse-lipped disapproval, in mine a bland dismissal of it. So we got along fine.

Like
this:

I
bounced into the kitchen, in which she seemed to spend her life, and asked: ‘Can I borrow the ironing board?’

Suspicion.
‘What for?’

‘
Press my suit. I’m going out.’

Sadness
and disillusionment. ‘I’ve got some lovely lamb chops.’

‘
Come on. They’ll keep.’

Resigned.
‘Gadding about! Is this a woman?’ But putting up the ironing board for me.

‘
Dinner with a lady.’

Raised
eyebrows. ‘And I suppose I’m not to meet her?’

‘
You wouldn’t approve. She’s got a sense of humour.’

‘
Since when didn’t I enjoy a good laugh?’ Standing back, all dour challenge.

‘
Since George Robey.’

Laughing.
‘Now there was a one!’ Impatience. ‘So where’s this suit of yours?’

‘
I can do it.’

‘
You can just go and have a bath, and that face could do with shaving. And you’re not holding yourself right, Clifford. You’re slumping. Never make the most of what you’ve got, you youngsters.’

I
was forty-one. ‘I’ll get the suit.’

‘
And how do you think you can afford to show a woman a good time...’

Like
that. I got out of there before she offered to lend me money.

But
all the same, climbing out of the bath and facing the mirror, I had to admit that I was out of shape. It’d been a convalescent home, not a health spa. I straightened my shoulders, scraped the old chin, fished out a clean shirt, and went down in my dressing gown.

‘
You could do with a new suit,’ she told me severely.

‘
Suits are for the birds. It’s jeans...’

‘
And you
will
use your garbled English. There, how’s that?’ She was great with shirts, but it takes a man to press his suit. I told her it was marvellous and kissed her on the cheek.

‘
If that means you want to borrow money...’ she grumbled.

‘
Not yet. I can still afford a bag of fish and chips.’

So
that when the horn pipped twice at the gate I got free without a promise to bring Nicola in. We’d have never got away...

‘
The Swan at Mecklin,’ she said.

‘
I heard it was fine.’

Nicola
drove her Volkswagen Golf GTI as though we’d entered the Monte Carlo Rally, relaxed, smooth, completely in control. We were halfway there before my aunt’s curtain could have twitched back into place.

A
failed TV director and his French wife had bought the Swan as a pub, and then flexed their imaginations. The simple bar meals had expanded. The kitchen had expanded. Now the straight drinkers had difficulty getting in, and were easily lured from the bar to the tables by the aromas. We ate wonderfully. She chatted and I listened, nodded, chewed. No shop. Her life and hopes and despairs. She was really a lost soul in the Civil Service, but she hadn’t realised it yet, so I didn’t say so. Nothing sufficiently creative for her. She was a natural loner, born to pick her artistic way through a procession of non-paying projects. Her independence would die a slow, inglorious death as a civil servant.

It
’s a lovely night,’ she said as we came out. She’d allowed me to pick up the bill. We drove, more sedately, back into town, and at last she spoke about the topic closest to both our thoughts.

‘
A pity you didn’t get more time in that room.’

‘
Yes.’ I glanced sideways at her. ‘But he’ll have been through it by now.’