Fortnight of Fear (24 page)

When he reached Times Square he stood on the curb outside Macy's for five or ten minutes. Then he saw a pretty well-dressed young girl crossing the street toward him, and he gave a last sniff, and straightened himself up, and smiled, at her.

Worthing, Sussex

Like most of the popular seaside resorts along Britain's south coast, Worthing was nothing more than a fishing hamlet until it was favored by a visit by royalty – in Worthing's case, by Princess Amelia, the youngest daughter of George III, when she came to take the bracing Channel air in 1798. In the next 14 years, Worthing grew into the safe, dull and geriatric town it is today. It has a shingled beach, four miles of promenades, a pier, concert halls and the Connaught theater. Paintings in Worthing Museum include many fine 19th-century and Victorian watercolors.

Despite Worthing's dullness, it still has a strong sense of history and place – positioned as it is between the sea and the South Downs, where you can still find Iron Age camps, prehistoric flint mines and wild, windy views of the sea.

I saw my first-ever real-live dead body the morning I arrived at 5a Bedford Row; and if that wasn't a cue to turn right around and never go back, I don't know what else could have been.

But I was soaking wet and starving hungry and absolutely knackered after walking from the station, and I really didn't have anywhere else to go.

5a Bedford Row was about a hundred yards down a narrow sidestreet off the seafront in Worthing. It was the last week in August, 1967, and it was raining so hard you couldn't tell where the sea ended and the town began. The clouds were racing north towards the Sussex Downs like a pack of wet mad dogs. I'd only had cornies for breakfast with no milk and my unemployment money hadn't turned up before I left London. Apart from that the train had stopped for three-quarters of an hour at Christ's Hospital for no apparent reason at all, and we'd all just sat there watching the rain run down the windows.

It was nearly eleven o'clock before we got into Worthing, and even then I had a twenty-minute walk down the back streets, past the police station and the art college and the Connaught Theater.

5a Bedford Row was a flat-fronted three-story house: typical Sussex coast mid-Victorian, faced with diseased gray cement, broken guttering, slipped slates. The doorbell didn't work (or at least I couldn't hear it and no bugger
came to answer it) and when I opened the letter-box to shout hallo, anybody home, I was greeted by this steady breeze smelling of damp plaster and Izal toilet-blocks and other people's stale chip-fat.

I was only a second away from seeing my first real-live dead body, though I didn't know it. Because of the rain, I hadn't seen the black Daimler hearse parked on the otherside of the Row, by the bus garage. I was still peering into the letter-box with rain running down the collar of my Millett's anorak when the front door was suddenly jostled open and this tall red-faced chap with a noseful of broken veins came struggling out backwards, carrying the end of an open coffin.

“Will you watch out for Christ's sake,” he snapped at me, out of the corner of his mouth.

Then he shuffled and swayed and blinked up at the sky. “Fuck it, it's still fucking raining. And trust you to forget the fucking lid.”

He was addressing this abuse to a thin waxy-faced young chap who was holding the other end of the coffin, his lank hair swinging, his forehead greasy with perspiration.

But it was the occupant of the coffin who startled me the most. My nerves thrilled as if somebody had circled my forehead with elastic bands. She was lying in this coffin and she was dead. Well, I mean, it was logical that she was dead, you don't usually lie in a coffin unless you're dead, but she was actually dead, her head nodding as they carried her in a slack way that it never could have nodded if she had been alive.

She was skinny and drawn and worst of all she was whitish-blue, even her lips. The darkness of her eyes showed through her closed eyelids like the eyes of a dead fledgling.

“I've got the umbrella, Mr Pedrick,” said the young chap, in a hopeful voice.

“Oh, you've got the fucking umbrella, have you, and who's going to hold it up? Our ladyfriend in the box here?”

I don't know why, but I said, “It's all right, I will.”

Mr Pedrick's gray-blue eyes swiveled into focus. “Well, that's a noble offer, now. Very noble. They may not feel it, you know, the dead” (jerking his head down at the body) “the rain” (jerking his head up at the clouds). “But they deserve our respect at the very least.”

The two of them struggled across the Row with the coffin while I kept awkward shuffling pace beside them, holding up their huge black musty-smelling umbrella, which must have sheltered a thousand widows at a thousand rainy gravesides. Mr Pedrick wrestled with the hearse door and at last they managed to slide the coffin noisily into place.

The waxy-faced young chap covered the body with the coffin-lid, and then sneezed.

“Oh God where's your fucking hankie,” Mr Pedrick snapped at him, and then to me, “I'm most grateful, a noble act.”

“That's all right,” I told him. “I've never seen one before.”

Mr Pedrick rolled his eyes toward the coffin. “You've never seen a –?”

I shook my head, feeling numb and peculiarly innocent and very wet.

“There's one thing, they don't argue. They can look accusing. Oh yes, and they can look
very
resentful at times. But they don't argue.” He paused, and then he sniffed. “They'd better fucking not, anyway.”

From the tone of his voice, I took it that he would be quite prepared to beat up a body that even
looked
as if it might be arguing.

I stood and watched the undertakers drive away. I felt really weird, as if I'd blinked and missed a whole day out
of my life. Eternity, I thought, that's what it is. It was a bit like jet-lag, except that I'd never been on a jet then, so I didn't know what jet-lag was like. I crossed the street slowly back to the house.

The door was still half-open and I could see a woman in the hall, polishing a small hall-table with a cloth that had once been a child's nightdress. She was probably fifty; and twenty years ago she had probably been quite handsome, in a chubby sort of way. Now her face was oval and featureless, like a white dinner-plate. She wore one of those floral housecoats that women wore during the war, and her gray hair was pinned up with a crisscross fence of about eight thousand kirbygrips. She was smoking as if she was in a smoking race.

“Mrs Bristow?” I asked her. “I'm David Moore.”

She stared at me, sipping at her cigarette. Then she said, “Bit wet, aren't you? Where's your things?”

“Actually I haven't got any things. I mean, not as such. I thought the room was furnished.”

She paused, sip, puff, sip, puff. “Well, it is. But there isn't much. I mean there's pots and pans, and a cheese-grater. But no sheets or blankets or anything. And I don't supply soap or toilet-paper.”

“I, er – I left most of my stuff in London. I was thinking of buying some new sheets.”

Mrs Bristow folded and refolded the nightdress. “Well, then,” she said. “You'll want to see the room.”

“Yes, smashing.” I smiled, although I felt so cheesed off I could have burst into tears. Mrs Bristow, wide-hipped in her housecoat, led the way upstairs, smoking and polishing as she went.

There was nothing in 5a Bedford Row to cheer your heart. The wallpaper down the stairs had obviously once been patterned with roses, but time and damp had strained all the color out of it, so that the roses looked like week-old cauliflowers. The banisters were stained with
dark Edwardian varnish, and the staircase creaked and groaned as we climbed it.

“I met the undertakers on the way in,” I said, as we reached the first-floor landing.

Mrs Bristow stopped, and stared at me. “That was Miss Coates,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“Poor Miss Coates,” Mrs Bristow repeated, louder, as if she thought I were deaf. “She used to do piecework, you know. Making up first-aid kits for some mail-order company. There's dozens of them, in the cellar. I'll have to ring up the company and get them to take them all away. She gave me a first-aid kit once, when her rent was late. Dear me, flipping useless, it was. Two sticking plasters and a tube of Germolene. Fat lot of good if you cut your head off.”

“I suppose you're right,” I said. Then, “What did she die of?”

Mrs Bristow didn't answer, but heaved her way up the next flight of stairs like an impatient rock-climber. Through a small window at the end of the landing, I could just glimpse a gray rain-ribbed roof and a haze of lighter greeny-grayness which I took to be the sea.

“Of course, she had Room Two,” said Mrs Bristow.

“I'm sorry?”

“Miss Coates. She had Room Two. That's our best room. Sea view, self-contained kitchenette, ladies only. Newly decorated, too.”

“Oh,” I said.

We resumed our climb. “Of course it's very coveted amongst my lady tenants, Room Two. So much bigger and nicer. It used to be my husband and I's room.”

“Oh, nice,” I said. I wished she would stop puffing smoke in my face.

“Idyllic in the summer, Room Two. Absolutely idyllic.
Miss Coates liked it so much, she said she wanted to spend the rest of her days there.”

“Well, she did, didn't she?” I ventured.

Mrs Bristow stopped again, and turned to stare at me through a sliding wreath of gray cigarette smoke. “I do expect proper behaviour, you know,” she told me. “I don't expect parties and I don't expect, you know, overnight friends. Of
either
, you know, sex.”

I nodded obediently. I had about three-and-six in my jacket pocket for a half of bitter and a Cormish pasty, and she expected me to have parties, and to be able to woo somebody into an overnight friendship? But I resisted the temptation to say you must be bleeding joking missis.

We were almost up at the top of the house when we heard the sound of a small child grizzling, and the sharp clatter of worn-down high heels on the stairs. As we reached the top landing, Mrs Bristow stood back against the wall, like a railway lineworker waiting for an express to pass, and I did, too. Along the landing came a rolled-up pink satin quilt, walking on long fishnet-stockinged legs. The quilt was followed by a blonde boy of about two years old in a stripey orange-and-brown T-shirt and nothing else, grumbling and crying.

“I haven't vacew-ummed Room Two yet, Nancy,” said Mrs Bristow, blowing out smoke from both nostrils.

The quilt was dropped abruptly to the floor. A girl's white face appeared, with wild back-combed dyed-black hair, and huge eyes with two pairs of false eyelashes. Then a deeply low-scooped black sweater, into which were crammed the biggest whitest breasts that I had ever seen in my whole life. A wide black patent-leather belt, cinched tight. And then a cheap white cotton mini-skirt, with fraying seams.

“Oh 'allo, Mrs B. Didn't see you behind me bedding.”

“Nancy, this is Mr Moore. He's coming to stay in Room Seven.”

“David,” I said, holding out my hand; and then realizing that Nancy didn't have a hand free to shake it.

“Pleased to meet you, David,” said Nancy. “This misery-guts here is Simon, aren't you, Simon?”

Simon continued to grizzle unabated.

“Well, since you're so keen to move in already, I'll do the vacewming later,” said Mrs Bristow, puff, sip. “Come on, Mr Moore, I'll show you your room.”

“See you later, aye?” smiled Nancy, and then, “Shut up, Simon, for God's sake.”

Room Seven was high in the roof, with a dormer window propped open with an old hairless washing-up brush. I had a saggy bed and a red Parker-Knoll chair and a table with a tiny cream-colored Belling electric cooker on it, and about a million cigarette burns all the way along the edge.

“It's very light in the mornings, Room Seven,” said Mrs Bristow. “And you can see the Dome, too. Just a peek, anyway.”

She waited at the open door. “It's two weeks' deposit and a week in advance,” she said. “That's thirteen pounds ten.”

“Erm, I wonder if I could pay you at the end of the week. I'm afraid my cheque hasn't come yet.”

Mrs Bristow's head disappeared in a cloud of smoke, and she coughed. “I don't usually,” she said.

“I'd be very grateful.”

“Well, all right, then,” she sighed, and disappeared down the stairs, leaving a trail of smoke behind her. “But Friday,” she called back. “Or else I'm afraid you're out.”

I went to the open dormer window and stared out at the rainy slate rooftops. Below me I could hear traffic on the wet roads, and the insistent shushing of the sea. I felt depressed and lonely but at the same time I felt strangely content. I had come to Worthing because it was the most depressing place I could think of, and I needed a sanctuary that suited my mood. I was broke, and out
of work, and my life didn't seem to be going anywhere. Nineteen-and-a-half, with no prospects. What better place to get your head together than Worthing?

The only reason I knew Worthing was because my great-aunt had lived here when I was little, and we used to come and visit. The beach was all pebbles and smelled strongly of seaweed.

Worthing has a pier, and one of those grassy municipal squares that Sussex people call a Steyne, and a bandstand, and some public toilets, and several nasty department stores full of shiny reproduction furniture and place-mats with hunting scenes on them, and EPNS cutlery. It's neither as vulgar as Brighton nor as self-consciously tight-arsed as Eastbourne. It's just a gray British suburb by the sea.
St-Despair-sur-Mer
, as my great-aunt used to call it.