Falling Over (12 page)

He looked in turn to the woman who had stolen the brooch, and the one Alice had called ‘granny’.

“No, no,” they said from opposite sides of the room, in fluttery voices that didn’t seem to fit their fresh and youthful aspects.

Everyone was staring at the seething, twitching young waiter, as if he wasn’t the one who took orders but the one who gave them. He was sweating now, and Vince noticed his sweat cut a path through the grease on his face; his skin didn’t seem the same colour underneath.

“Well,” he said, “well. You’ll have to leave early of course. And
pay
early.”

The atmosphere in the room changed, although Vince struggled to understand exactly how. It didn’t make sense; these people weren’t even staying at the hotel! The young jewellery thief was dabbing her eyes with an old-fashioned lace handkerchief;  Vince recognised the handkerchief too.

The other lady seemed more composed; she smoothed her dark green dress and walked towards Alice. Her pretty face now seemed another creation of makeup and ointment; Vince wanted to sneeze again. He wanted to run out the basement and up the stairs, but now these grownups had spotted them both he and Alice had lost all volition.

Alice clasped his hand again, was leaning to whisper something in his ear... but the lady in the green dress rudely pulled her away. Alice’s fingers slipped through his like someone falling.

“Granny?” Alice said tremulously to the lady who was leading her away, who couldn’t be more than twenty-one. There was a muttering around the room – “for shame!” one of the young men said quietly. But no one moved. All Vince could think was that he didn’t want to get told off; he felt confused and close to tears.

“Granny!” Alice said in pain as the woman yanked at her arm again; she was pulling Alice across to where the waiter stood.

“As you’ve so often reminded me you ungrateful brat,” the woman said, “I’m
not
your granny.”

Alice looked back at Vince as if appealing for him to do something, but he didn’t know what and so he did nothing.

“Perfect,” the hotel boy said as he laid a hand on Alice’s shoulder. She stopped pulling away at his touch, and when he let go she stood stock still with her back to Vince. He saw a greasy mark on her dress where the boy’s hand had been.

“And you?” the boy said to the lady wearing the stolen brooch. She was still in tears and didn’t respond; the boy shrugged and walked towards Vince, leaving Alice motionless in the same statue-like pose. He was grinning and had tracks of grey scored through his greasy face.

“Wait! No!” the lady he’d addressed cried out, snapping from her thoughts. “Not... for mercy’s sake! My husband will pay!” She looked round the room as if seeking approval. “At the end of my week... He’d got... He’s not got his wits, he...”

The young waiter had paused at her words, and only Vince had seen the look of hatred that had passed across his face as she had spoke. He looked cowed into taking orders again. He turned to face her.

“But he can’t
stay
. For a week? What if he comes down again? What if he tells...”

“He’s just a
child
,” the lady interrupted. The boy angrily ran a hand through his hair, left it dishevelled with the greasy ointment he smeared through it. He glanced at Alice (who still hadn’t moved since he’d laid his hand on her) and this seemed to calm him somewhat.

“Either that,” he said, “or you all three leave early. No payment but get out. He’s a risk...”

“But I’m here for the whole week!” the lady interrupted, and the fearless way she did so remind Vince of something, although he couldn’t have said what. “This is my last...”

“I will not be swayed in this,” the boy said. He glanced towards Alice again, his eyes eager with something.

Turn around, Vince was thinking – if she’d just turn and ask him to do something then he
would
, but without her asking him he didn’t know what...

And then the lady with the brooch had him by the arm and was dragging him towards the spiral stairs that led up to the hotel lobby. The music started up again as if a vast distance away, and the young people started dancing. The shapes they made together were beautiful and blocked Vince’s view of Alice.

“But she’s stolen my grandma’s brooch!” he cried out to them.

“Oh for heaven’s sake
Vince!
” the young lady snapped.

~

The next morning Vince supposed it must all have been a dream. Well not all of it; he’d probably fallen asleep in the hotel lobby and dreamt the rest, and Alice had somehow got him back to his room. Or maybe the dream had started later than that, for he did have dust on his clothes, and the taste of it in the back of his mouth.

Earlier than he expected his grandma came through the connecting door between the two rooms.

“Pack your bags, Vince,” she said, “we’re leaving.”

“But we’ve got all week!” he protested.

“It’s... your grandfather,” she said. “He’s sick.” She muttered something else under her breath as she turned away.

“But we can come again next year, right?” Vince said,

“Vince! Pack!” his granny shouted. Vince didn’t understand why, if she was so angry, she also seemed to be crying too.

But she’s got her brooch on, he thought. So it
had
to have been a bad dream, after all.

~

The hotel lobby was empty; it was so early the young boy was still being a waiter in the dining room rather than manning the desk. There was a bell to ring for attention, but his grandma didn’t press it. She seemed eager to leave, she shooed Vince and his grandfather towards the door.

Outside was not one but two taxis.

“Grandma we haven’t
paid
,” Vince said. He was trying to look through the frosted glass door to the dining room to see Alice one last time.

“We don’t have to,” his grandma said. “Because, well, we’re leaving so early. Lucky for your grandfather they let us off...”

“Where
are
we?” the old man said in a weak voice. Vince’s grandma set her lips in a thin tight line.

They got into one of the waiting taxis outside; Vince sneezed and his grandma gave him a tissue to blow his nose. As they were pulling away Vince stared out the back window of the cab to get one last look at the hotel.

An old lady, wincing and looking like she had been crying, was getting into the other taxi. She struggled with her luggage until the driver got out to help her.

Alice
, thought Vince, for it was Alice’s grandmother.

But the old lady got into the back of the taxi on her own, shut the door, and then it too pulled away, in the opposite direction.

The Man Dogs Hated

You could always tell when he was out walking in the neighbourhood, because you’d hear the dogs barking all along his route. He walked most evenings, that was one of the things about him. I’d be sitting having a glass of wine with Deborah on the patio – the sun would just be sinking and the evening would have that clear, golden quality to it. And then the peace would be broken by barking, or even howling, as
he
passed a dog-owner’s house somewhere – it made you shiver, a bit, to hear that wolf-like howling across the English summer.

Deborah would look at me like she expected me to
do
something, but I’d just gesture her inside. She didn’t understand it wasn’t for me to act unilaterally; things don’t work like that here.

What was worse was when he passed a dog in the street. I saw it happen a few times. He’d just be standing there, whilst the dog-walker tried to drag their mutt away. And the dog would be snarling and slobbering and straining on its lead to
get
to him. They weren’t scared of him, it seemed more like intrinsic hatred. Even the most placid of pets, even old Bob’s blind-dog, would go feral at the sight of him – the smell of him maybe. You know when dogs bare their teeth and you realise how
animal
they are? Not cuddly pets at all but beasts.

I’m not a dog person, myself.

And
he
just stood there and the odd thing was he looked at them with such affection, almost simple-looking – a man who loved dogs. They wanted to tear his throat out and he just grinned like a fool in love. Maybe he was simple? It would explain a lot. But I never forget that look in his eyes. That look was why I didn’t believe the stories that he killed dogs, poisoned pets. Not
those
stories, no. And events proved me right on that one.

It makes me wonder if some of the other stories about him weren’t falsehoods too: him being near that playground; the strange noises from his house at night; him just standing staring at people through shop windows like he didn’t realise they could see him too. Not that it makes much difference what was true and what wasn’t. He
was
odd, no question, so we would have done the same as we did regardless of the specifics. We were all agreed on
that.
You can’t be too careful, in a neighbourhood like this one.

~

I’ve lived here for close to twenty years now; I still remember when we first arrived, Deborah and I, and how it immediately felt like
home
. Not our new house, not being married, but the place itself, the neighbourhood. Felt like the place I’d been aiming for all my life, the place that finally made sense of all those late nights in the office, all that schmoozing with bosses I hated. The broad streets were lined with trees – old trees, as old as the houses perhaps. Newly washed cars glinting in the sun on long, curved drives. Every house set back from the road by a large and immaculate front lawn. I remember my father saying once that front lawns were pointless; they couldn’t be used, he said, they were only for show, only for other people. I thought,
exactly.
I didn’t want to live in the kind of street my father had lived in.

I felt like I’d arrived.

I wondered at the time whether there’d be a price for living somewhere like this, for belonging here as much as I did. It was McFarlane who showed me that there was.

~

He
lived alone, in the old Anderson house – we still called it that, despite the fact that the Mievilles had lived there in the interim. The Mievilles had arrived with three children, so we could see why they’d bought a big old house like that despite not really being able to afford it, as it later transpired. The Mievilles had been welcomed into the neighbourhood initially; we weren’t prejudiced or anything. How a man makes his money is his own business. And we were glad someone was going to do up the old Anderson place, which was an eyesore and was starting to drag down prices for the whole street. But the Mievilles didn’t do it up at all, they just left it to get worse. If they couldn’t afford it they shouldn’t have moved in. We were friendly enough telling them that it wasn’t on, at first. And there was no prejudice, as I say.

How
he
could afford the house no one knew. He certainly didn’t go to work. The postman told us he received a lot of mail, cheques he thought. From where or whom we never knew. We didn’t even know
how
he’d bought the house – not through Havershaw and McFarlane like everyone else does around here. So McFarlane disliked him from the off, but that isn’t to say he wasn’t given a fair chance.

~

People thought he was odd from the start, of course, but eccentric is allowed. (Think of Mrs Needham and all her damn trinkets; think of old Bob obsessively polishing his medals, though we all know he gets them from car boot sales.) And he kept to himself, you had to give him that much. Never spoke to you unless you spoke to him first, and even then you rarely got more than a goofy smile in response. If you made gestures when speaking he stared at your hands not your face. You could tell he was odd, not eccentric but
odd
, as soon as you saw him. In the same way I knew I belonged here, all those years ago, I knew he didn’t. Against the trim lawns and discrete houses he looked wrong, walking around grinning, in ill matching clothes. He stood out. He mismatched.

We gave him a chance but he never... He didn’t fix his garden up, didn’t repair the old Anderson place. Nor did he attend neighbourhood fetes or functions. Never applied to join the golf club or the Rotary. These things take up time, I know, but sacrifices have to be made in a place like this.

And gradually the rumours started about him; I don’t know how many were actually true: he’d been seen on the school playing field late at night; he spent an unusually long time in the WCs at the library; he
never
put out any rubbish for the bin men on Tuesdays.

“You’ll never guess what I heard about that man today..!” Deborah would say to me, and I never asked her who she had heard her stories
from
.

I know a few of the rumours were true: how he’d taken a cake Angie Havershaw had bought round as a welcome gift and put it straight out in his garden for the birds. I could see him from my bedroom window, standing amid all the squabbling crows and pigeons. Like I say, just odd – I mean Angie can’t cook for toffee we all know that, but there are some things that you just don’t do.

The stories kept piling up about him; whether each specific tale was true I don’t know, but the sum total of them was. He would have to leave, just like it was made clear to the Mievilles, after it became obvious.

McFarlane called, and said it was time.

~

Now that I think about it, despite all his oddness I think it was those damn dogs that did for him, in the end. Their constant howling across our streets, unable to get rid of their hatred.

~

When McFarlane made it clear we were welcome here, truly welcome here, with his clap on the back and proffered brandy in the golf club bar, it felt like an initiation, a ritual indicating a test passed. Of course, I’d heard the stories about him by then, roguish lech that he was... but like I say eccentric is allowed. I sipped the brandy and toasted him ironically. It’s an easy memory to recover, because the golf club bar hasn’t changed in all these years, and neither has McFarlane.

“Welcome to the neighbourhood,” he said. “I do hope I’m going to get to meet your good wife at some point?” and I made a mental note to invite him round, despite the anxiety I knew Deborah always felt entertaining strangers. “So nice,” he’d continued, “to have the
right
kind of people in the neighbourhood. Not like that new couple just moved in on Victoria road...” He trailed off, and let me say the rest.

They were the first, that I was involved in.

~

The evening we went to speak to him, the man the dogs hated, I stepped out the front door, and already a dog was barking somewhere. McFarlane’s way of making people who didn’t fit in leave was simplicity itself – it was meant to be just a gentlemanly chat. Business-like – and this
was
business, of a kind. We would explain that there were places for people like us, and places for people like him, and those two sets of places didn’t always overlap. In his case certainly didn’t. Sometimes when we spoke to people they were even half-relieved, because the situation was surely obvious to them too. Sometimes they didn’t take much persuading. And if they did, well, there were other ways.

There were about ten of us that night, more than normal. I had almost not gone, but I’d remembered Deborah’s scornful look every time I’d ushered her inside the shadowy house from the patio when the howling started, and I changed my mind.

Rather than knocking on his door, we decided it best to confront him when he was on one of his odd evening walks. He had no set route but we just headed towards the sound of barking. There was a sense of camaraderie on these occasions, a sense of shared purpose. But I don’t mind admitting that feeling was strained that night; it was almost spooky, to be out walking at sunset and hear all those dogs howling and yapping at the sky. I felt a little nervous. I hadn’t with the Mievilles, hadn’t for years, but I did that night.

We saw his shadow first, stretched and black in the sunset. It moved with the same aimlessness that he did – like he owned the place. But he was surprisingly fast for that, and before we could stop him he turned up Goose Gate, which was a cul-de-sac (so why go up there?) and so we decided to wait at the bottom of the street for him to come back down. For a moment it was peaceful – the only sound the swifts screeching. Then there was a commotion – we walked up a bit to look. The newcomers at Number 20 had let their dog roam loose in their garden and it was up on its hind legs at the fence, barking like it thought it was three times bigger than it was. All we could see of him was his silhouette, which paused, like it wanted to go and befriend the thing despite the hatred in its bark. Then he slowly turned and walked back down the street, towards where we were waiting.

I’ll never know whether he actually understood what we had to say to him. Oh he nodded, and said yes a few times, but his eyes still had that glazed, simple look, so who could tell? He frowned at some things, not in anger but like he didn’t understand the concept at all – didn’t understand housing equity or why he shouldn’t talk to children. It was mostly like he heard our words but didn’t grasp their import (like Angie said, maybe he
was
foreign, despite the flat accent). When he looked between us it was always a few seconds after one of us had stopped speaking and the other started.

But then his eyes lit up; he was smiling but not at us. He was looking at something behind us.

I turned to look – Mrs Douglas was slowly walking along the main street, towards the turn off to Goose Gate. She had that small yappy poodle trotting along on a lead. She called it Precious, of all things, and it had always been a noisy and cantankerous dog even before
he
had come here. It hadn’t seen him yet, it was lingering behind to sniff at some piss on a lamppost; Mrs Douglas was carrying a small freezer bag with its crap in it. Better than when it had used to lie in the street, but my nose still wrinkled with distaste. I don’t know who’s worse, dogs or their owners.

We called out to her to stay on the opposite side of the road, so she could walk Precious past without too much uproar when it noticed
him
. But she couldn’t hear us. Instead the deaf old idiot started crossing the street to try and hear what we were saying. We gestured at her to go back, and she stopped in the middle of the road in confusion.

Precious had noticed by now, and was barking and straining at its lead. The thing looked
rabid
. I thought that it must just sense that he’s not right, in some way, like we did.

Get back, we said again, but she walked forward instead.

Just then two bikes came down the main street – just kids racing. Our roads are pretty quiet, so children are safe on bikes. One went one side of Mrs Douglas, one the other, and they were laughing and hollering; one reached out to tap Mrs Douglas on the shoulder as he passed – a childhood prank that made me nostalgic. It was
nothing
; but Mrs Douglas reacted like she’d been shot. She cried out, threw both her hands up in the air, staggered back a few steps. The boys went giggling off into the night; the freezer bag of dog shit flew into the air; and Precious was suddenly racing across the road snarling, lead clattering behind it. Its teeth were bared and its eyes bulged. We were all so startled we stepped back from the vicious looking thing.

I thought it was going to rip his throat out.

Of course, a small dog like that couldn’t have done him much harm normally, despite how frenzied it looked. But the damn idiot bent down to it as it came, as if to pet it, as if to scoop it into a hug. He had that idiot look of affection in his eyes; his smile was wide and beatific.

Precious leapt...

The bag of shit fell back into our street and burst.

... the dog’s forepaws caught him in his chest, his arms clasped the slavering dog in an embrace, and he fell backward with the impact...

Then there was one of those seconds which seemed much longer, or like you’ve blacked out, because everything was different afterwards.

He
was lying on the pavement and Precious was stood atop him – at first I thought she was biting his face but she was just licking it. Her tail was wagging frantically and he had one hand up, just stroking her back and behind her ears. His eyes were closed.

No one knew what to do for a second – McFarlane was no bloody use – so I approached cautiously (it wasn’t seemly, for him to be lying in the street as he was). I reached out for the lead, being careful not to touch the damn mutt itself, and the thing turned and growled at me with slobbering jaws. It looked at me with the hatred of dogs.

Then it turned back to him, all eager and affectionate again.

“Precious?” Mrs Douglas said weakly.