A Sight for Sore Eyes (10 page)

he would have adored to this day, would still be alive, his daughter would have grown up a normal, happy girl and as for Julia... 'What is it?' he said. Francine's large dark eyes were a little too bright. 'If I'm never allowed to go out alone and I'm never here in the house alone and I always have to be home before dark, how am I going to go up to Oxford where I'll have to be on my own?' She added, 'I'm only asking. If it sounds sarcastic I don't mean it to.' Julia was - the word that came into his head was 'grooming' -was training her up for that. Gradually. Getting her used to life and the world out there and social usage. Or was she? Was she really? 'How am I going to live alone? Because that's what I'll be doing, won't I? How am I going to be allowed to look after myself with no one to watch over me the way Julia does?' A memory came to him of reading about people who had been accompanied to their universities by parents or guardians or selected companions. It was a nightmare idea - or was it? He said tentatively, 'You know, you could take a year out.' It was Julia's suggestion. She had made it to him the evening before. 'Let her go up to Oxford in October twelvemonth, let her take a gap year. They're all doing it, it's the fashionable thing.' 'What and loaf about at home here? Doing what?' Julia hadn't replied. 'And when her year is up I was thinking, well, I was wondering - could we possibly move to Oxford so that we'd still all be together?' 'And what am I supposed to do every day? Commute?' But after a moment's thought Richard had agreed to the first part of Julia's proposal. Francine should take a year out. If she wanted to. She hadn't replied. He put it to her again. 'Holly is going to do that,' Francine said thoughtfully. Richard had never thought he would bless that little hussy Holly for anything. He smiled.

Chapter 12

When he had taken the last bagful of wood out with him and the dining-room was empty Teddy cleaned it. He took down the curtains and threw them into his parents' bedroom. He swept the floor and washed the french windows. Many of his drawings were already up on the walls and now he added to them another design in a frame he had made from the mahogany from the dining-table. The rest of it had been transformed into a low circular table. The thick polish and dirt-encrusted surface planed away, he had left the wood its natural shade of a warm golden russet and inlaid the border with ebony and maple, pieces of which he had picked up at college when no one was looking. This table, his bed and the books between the bookends were the room's sole furnishings, but the rest of it was filled up with his workbench and his tools. Keith hadn't been into the dining-room since the day the policeman had come and told him Jimmy had been taken to hospital. What brought him in now Teddy didn't really know. Possibly, having returned from his last call-out of the evening via Oddbins, he had been made suspicious by the light behind the french windows. Undimmed by the thick velvet curtains, it must have streamed out across the concrete, a floodlighting to meet Keith as he wobbled in on the motor bike. Teddy switched off the light. The back garden went pitch dark, as Keith had turned off the motor-bike lights when he came through the gate and there were no lights on next door. The yuppies, Teddy was pretty sure, were out. He heard Keith stumble as he blundered to the back door. Once he was inside, Teddy turned his light on again and returned to his drawing. It was January and the mirror he was designing had to be finished and submitted by the last day of April. Keith didn't knock. It wouldn't have occurred to him to do so. Teddy heard how he opened the door. He turned the handle, then stepped back and aimed a mighty kick at the door. It flew open and its handle hit the wall behind. He stood there, breathing heavily from the effort. The bags he let fall on to the floor as if their weight was finally too much for him. Whatever he might have come to say, he didn't say it. His mouth fell open. 'What's happened to the furniture?' 'What furniture?' said Teddy. 'Don't you fuckin' give me what furniture. My dad's table and chairs and sideboard as was in here. What you done with it? Old Chance had to take that to pieces and put it together again to get it in here.' 'Then it can't have got out, can it?' Keith picked up his bags and retreated to the kitchen. While there he must have taken a swig of whisky. He came back, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. 'If you've sold that furniture I'll have the law on you. That was mine, like everything else in this house.' 'It's got legs,' said Teddy, 'so it can walk, can't it? What else are legs for? It squeezed through the doorways and walked out in the street and got on a bus and now it's living in a second-hand shop in Edgware.' Keith put up his fists and came at him the way Jimmy had done all those years ago. Teddy stood up. He was about three inches taller than Keith, as well as a couple of lifetimes younger. 'Don't try that,' he said. After a while he heard Keith go into the front room. The television came on, some gangster film, all crashes and gunshots and the choking cries of the dying. He listened, heard the top of a can peeled off. Keith's evening of gradual befuddlement had begun. The mirror was to have some sort of geometric inlay on its frame. Teddy hadn't made up his mind what kind. Crosses, maybe, but not circles and crosses. He didn't want it looking like the Oxo building. Triangles perhaps, simple triangles, in pale wood lightly stained. Sycamore or holly would take a pale-yellow and a green stain. On the other hand parallel lines of inlay, all kept very light in colour, apricot, gold, beige, olive, might be the best. He drew designs, found Alfred Chance's box of water-colours. Keith's return was unexpected. He hesitated outside Teddy's door, perhaps summoning up the energy for his kick. The door flew open hard enough for the handle to hit the wall again. Keith had an open can of Guinness in his hand. 'I want you out of here,' he said. Teddy put down his paintbrush. 'You what?' 'You heard. If you'd toed the line a bit, if you'd kept your nose clean, I might have let you hang on till the summer. But oh, no, not you, you're destroying my home, breaking the place up, you're a fuckin' menace, you are, and you've got to go. Right? Savvy?' 'Who's going to put me out? You?' 'Me,' said Keith, 'and the law if that's what it takes.' And in a movement like a fist punching he threw half the contents of his drink can across Teddy's painting. A pool of brown liquid with a scud of foam on it flooded across the delicately coloured-in drawing of the mirror frame. No sound came from Teddy and scarcely any movement. He had been staring at Keith before the Guinness was thrown and he continued to stare, impassively, steadily. And Keith must have been more unnerved by this cold passivity than he would have been by any violent reaction, for his own gaze fell and, taking a defiant swig of what remained in the can, he turned and left the room. Teddy went out to the kitchen to find a rag. The cloth in a bowl under the sink had probably been crocheted by his mother. He looked at it without sentimental feelings or indeed any feelings at all except to notice, so to speak, her trademark, mistakes in the stitches and a bright-red border. It served its purpose, that is for mopping-up operations, but of course the drawing was ruined. Teddy wiped down his table, dried it on kitchen roll, wiped the floor, screwed up the drawing and dropped it into his waste-paper basket. When he had taken the cloth back he went to listen outside the front-room door. The television sound had been turned down. He heard the top peeled off another can and something that might have been the cap of the Chivas bottle unscrewed. Was it at this point that he decided or an hour later? Afterwards, he couldn't have said. Best, probably, not to think too much about it. Act, don't think. His room smelt of Guinness, heady, yeasty. Should he do another drawing or not? It was the pleasantest way he knew of passing the time. For half an hour or more he drew designs, but this time not colouring them in from his paintbox. Then he put the new drawings into a cardboard folder and the pencil into its box, gave the table another polish and stood by the french windows. The night was very dark, the hopeless blackness of midwinter when the sun, or what there was of it, had set at four and there had been no natural light for hours. He heard the yuppies next door come home. He could hear the click of their light switches, the one in the room next to this making quite a sharp crack. He switched off his own light. For a moment or two it was like being inside a black bag. Then objects outside began to take shape. Street lights were on, though not near at hand; light from next door made a yellowish glow on the air and yellow bars between the palings of the fence. He could see the outline of the carport, the tail of the Edsel immediately outside the windows, like a spacecraft that has landed too near for comfort. Light coming from somewhere made a pale streak on the bin-liners covering the bike. The sky was a very dark reddish purple. Next door they were switching off lights, they were going to bed. Their stairs creaked as they went up. He hadn't got a watch, had never had one, but he guessed the time at past midnight, nearer twelve-thirty. Out in the hall he had to feel his way, for all was in darkness. The line of dim light under the front-room door was a guide to him. He listened. He opened the door very quietly and stepped inside. On the bright but muted television a fat comedian was telling jokes deemed unsuitable for transmission at an earlier hour. Keith lay back in his armchair, his eyes closed, his mouth open. As if to acknowledge Teddy's arrival he suddenly emitted a rich, bubbling, liquid snore. The stub of the last cigarette he had smoked had failed to make it to the ashtray but had burnt itself out on the table top. A grey furry caterpillar it looked like in the dimness. The whole table top was scored with grub-shaped burn marks as if someone had been attempting poker work. Teddy came closer, blew at the ash caterpillar and watched it disappear in a pale cloud. Keith didn't stir. He had drunk three cans of Guinness and, if that whisky bottle had been full when he came in, getting on for half of it. Now to find another, suitable, plastic bag. There were so many names for the stuff, he knew them all because he hated them and what they stood for: polythene, polyethylene, polypropylene, polyester, polystyrene, polyvinyl. Polythene was the one needed here. There was plenty of it in the room, green and yellow and white and red bags discarded by Keith, dropped on to the floor, or thrust one inside the other, ten or eleven of them, to make a polycushion. One of these, the innermost, he pulled out. It was a biggish yellow bag with a single seam and it came from Selfridges. How had the likes of Keith ever acquired a Selfridges bag? It was impossible that he had ever been into the store. One of his customers must have given it to him because his own had come apart or because he had something to carry home with him. The polvthene was smooth, slippery and thick, what might be called an up-market grade-one superior plastic. Instead of holes cut in each side it had a stout band of the same plastic threaded through its top rather as cord passes through the waistband of track-suit pants. But this band protruded from two openings to form handles which, pulled on, would draw the top of the bag tight. It was just what he wanted, Teddy thought, it was ideal. Then he stopped thinking and acted. He acted mindlessly. First he turned off the television and stood in the dark, listening to the quietness. Traffic on the North Circular Road made a distant hum beyond the silence. He took off the clip that fastened the curtains together, parted them and let in the light from a street lamp that wasn't outside but up on the corner of the side-road. Keith made a gurgling noise, not quite a snore. He moved his head to the left, then back to its former position. Teddy picked up the yellow bag in both hands, holding it open. He disliked touching Keith but he had to, his hands coming into contact only with hair and briefly with a woollen pullover as, taking a deep breath, he pulled the bag over Keith's head. A certain amount of struggling was to be expected, but Keith didn't struggle. He was too far gone for that. Teddy drew the band on the bag as tightly as he could without breaking the plastic. He didn't leave the room, not then, but he turned his back. He stood in the window, looking out at the street he had seen from this window all his life, the long straight roadway, its surface painted yellow on black from the street lamps, the squat stucco houses, each with a mean little shelf over its front door instead of a porch, the chain-link fencing and behind it, where gardens should be, his neighbours' transport, aged cars, re-sprayed vans, motor bikes, push-bikes, and in one, next to a caravan, a boat with its hull uppermost. Teddy felt his usual loathing of it, a hatred that was always fresh; familiarity never taught him indifference. For a moment or two he almost forgot Keith and what was happening to Keith. Give mankind half a chance and it would make anything it came in contact with, anything it touched, ugly. His parents and Keith had been worse; they had found something ugly and made it uglier. Outside, a cat ran across the street, squeezed through a gate and, safe now, sauntered up to the doorstep where it sat down and began washing itself. A beautiful creature, large, slender, pale - he couldn't tell what colour - elegantly detached. People had bred dogs into grotesque shapes, hideous joke creatures, presumably to have something to laugh at, but they couldn't do that with cats, cats were always the same shape. He wondered why they couldn't and was sure it wasn't for want of trying. They would be bound to do their best in the pursuit of ugliness. The cat got up on to a windowsill, slithered in through an open fanlight. Teddy went back to his room. He dared not put on a light, so he sat in the dark. He didn't think about Keith, it was quite easy not to, but about his mirror and what he was going to do when he left college, how he was going to live. By making furniture? He doubted if you could earn a living at it. By doing it and doing something else as well? He would make a start tomorrow, he would advertise. Whatever it would cost he would get the money somehow. He got up and felt in the pocket of the jacket that hung on the door. Even in the dark a faint glitter came from the diamond. The ring was like a talisman. He held it tightly in his hand and felt the stone dig into his mutilated finger. The money for advertising must be found, but not by selling the ring. After what he calculated was half an hour he returned to the front room, loosened the band on the yellow plastic bag and lifted it off Keith's head. The blue rubber band came off his pony-tail at the same time. It was too dark to see much and he didn't want to see. But he had to feel. He felt for pulses on Keith's neck and wrists and, bracing himself, thrusting his hand under pullover and shirt, palpated with his finger where Keith's heart must be. There was nothing. The blood had ceased to circulate. Keith was dead. The french windows couldn't be fully opened since the coming of the Edsel. Its tail wasn't much more than two feet from the back of the house. Teddy unlatched the windows and pushed them ajar. The boot of the Edsel, like a grinning mouth with upturned corners, was locked. He hadn't thought of that. It meant feeling in Keith's pockets and fumbling through Keith's clothes once more, but it' had to be done. No keys, but quite a lot of money. He didn't look closely at the money, only enough to be aware that many of the notes were reddish-brown and purple, not green. His hands were shaking, his whole body now. He hadn't shaken when he killed Keith, but the possession of this money was making him shake. What did that say about human beings? Confirmed what he had always believed since he could reason, he told himself in a sudden gush of self-dislike, that they were low, degraded and devoted to materialism. He went upstairs. The keys must be somewhere. They must be somewhere in Keith's bedroom. With mounting distaste, he hunted through Keith's clothes, the clean, or cleaner, ones in the cupboard, the dirty pile on the floor. Through jacket pockets and trouser pockets and leathers and old canvas bags and the welter of rubbish in the tallboy's drawers. He looked under the bed and in the bed, under the pillows, lifted up