The Four Last Things (38 page)

The kitchen was empty. Panic attacked him and he began to tremble. Lucy had run away. Lucy had tricked him. She, too, had betrayed him. In the same instant, his mind filled with an unbearably vivid picture of her running down Rosington Road, her legs a blur, towards a uniformed policeman.

Lucy appeared in the doorway to the back garden. ‘I saw a bird. A robin?’

He lunged at her and grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘Don’t do that. I didn’t know where you were.’

She stared up at him but said nothing. He wondered how many times her parents had said those words to her. He wasn’t Lucy’s parent – he was her friend. He helped her into the coat and did up the zip and the buttons. Hand in hand, they walked into the garden. Eddie glanced up at the balcony of the Reynoldses’ flat. It was empty. They reached the belt of trees at the bottom of the garden. In the distance a train went by. It was very quiet.

Eddie had not been down here since the previous summer. A faint track wound its way between the saplings and bushes – perhaps made by the fox. At the fence, Eddie pulled aside the lid of a wooden packing case which he had leant against the hole, partially blocking it. On the other side of the hole was a piece of wood he had manoeuvred into position to conceal its presence from anyone in Carver’s. He poked his foot through the fence and kicked the wood over.

‘Funny forest,’ said Lucy, very seriously.

Eddie had put on weight since his last visit over six years earlier. The hole would be too narrow for him now. Lucy watched, fascinated, while he enlarged it. The surrounding wood had rotted still further, the damp creeping up from the earth. By pushing and kicking he managed to snap off enough of the neighbouring planks to widen the gap sufficiently for him to wriggle through.

‘Angel cross?’ Lucy suggested.

Eddie grunted non-committally, not wanting to frighten her unnecessarily. He wasn’t sure whether she meant that Angel would be cross when she discovered the hole, or that Angel was already cross for other reasons. He picked up the bag and swung it through into Carver’s.

‘I’ll go first.’

He crawled through the hole, making the knees of his jeans muddy. On the other side he turned, crouched down and held out a hand through the hole to Lucy. Without a moment’s hesitation, she put her hand in his and stepped through. Eddie tried to conceal the gap in the fence with the packing-case lid. With a little luck, Angel would think that he and Lucy had left by the front door.

‘There’s a nice little shed through there.’ Eddie pointed through the undergrowth. ‘You can see the corner of it. It’s like a house, isn’t it? Let’s go and explore.’

The fresh air was making him feel a little better. With the bag in his free hand, Eddie towed Lucy between the brambles and leafless branches. The ground was damp and mud clung to the soles of Eddie’s trainers. Once he had to lift her over a fallen tree, and she floated as light as a feather in his arms, her face smiling down at his; and in that instant Eddie was as happy as he had ever been. They drew nearer to the shed.

‘Is it a house?’ Lucy asked, her voice full of doubt.

‘It can be our house.’

Eddie hesitated in the doorway. Past collided with present. In memory it was always summer and the shed was in much better condition; he remembered it not as he had last seen it, but as he had known it with Alison. Now it was winter and the shed showed all too clearly the effects of exposure to the elements for over fifty years. Only a third of the roof was now left. The two ash saplings towered above the walls like a pair of gangling adolescents. The floor was a sea of dead leaves. The window opening had lost not only its glass but its frame as well. There was rubbish, too – more than before, which suggested that people were regularly finding their way into Carver’s. Eddie glared at the empty cans and bottles, at the crisp packets and cigarette ends; they were blemishes on his privacy.

Lucy poked her head inside the doorway and looked around. She said nothing.

‘We must tidy it up,’ Eddie told her. ‘Make it more homely.’ He noticed two tins which had once contained cement at the back of the shed. ‘Look, they can be our seats. We’ll put them under the bit with a roof.’

He set to work violently – pushing most of the leaves and rubbish into a heap against the wall underneath the window opening; setting the tins upside down so they could be used as seats; turning a wooden drawer on its side to serve as a table; and removing the worst of the cobwebs from the roof.

At first Lucy stood there, watching and sucking her fingers. After a moment, the magic of playing house affected her and they worked as a team. She fussed over the placing of the tins and the drawer, adjusting them, standing back to observe the results from afar, and then readjusting them. All the time she was doing this she hummed to herself, a made-up tune which consisted of three notes, monotonously repeated. He glanced covertly at her, marvelling at her absorption.

Lucy found a jam jar in the pile of rubbish, emptied out the brown water it contained and set it with a flourish on the table.

‘It’s a vase,’ she informed him. ‘For flowers.’

She darted out of the shed. There was a spindly mallow bush growing by the wall; it still had some leaves and even a few shrivelled flowers whose pink had rotted into a dark, funereal purple. She broke off a spray, brought it into the shed and stuck it into the jam jar.

‘Lovely,’ Eddie said. ‘Very pretty.’

Lucy sat down on one of the tins and looked from the jam jar to Eddie. ‘Is it time for breakfast?’

He sat down on the other tin, lifted the bag on to his lap and unzipped it. The exertion had brought back his illness in full force: he felt very dizzy, his eyeballs too large for their sockets. He put the packet of biscuits and a can of Coca-Cola on the table.

Lucy stared at them. ‘For breakfast?’

Eddie opened the biscuits and removed the ring pull from the can. He waved his hand in a lordly gesture. ‘Help yourself.’

Lucy looked worried. ‘Mummy doesn’t let me drink Coke. It’s bad for your teeth.’

‘This is a special treat.’

‘Like on holiday?’

Eddie nodded. While she ate, Eddie hugged himself and tried to keep warm. He knew that he should be using this time to make plans, to avoid the opposing dangers of Angel and the police. Lucy was such a complication. He couldn’t leave her and he couldn’t take her with him. He stared at her and she lifted her head. Little white milk teeth chewed the biscuit. She smiled at him and picked up the Coke.

He decided to explore the contents of the bag again. If he were by himself, and if the police weren’t looking for him, everything would be straightforward. He had several thousand pounds in his bank account and his building society account. He had his driving licence. He could go anywhere in the country, even apply for a passport and go abroad, and Angel wouldn’t be able to find him. He could hire a solicitor who would evict Angel from the house. His mind shied away from considering what she would do with the contents of the freezer in the basement; take them with her, presumably. If necessary he would leave the house and start a new life somewhere else. The prospect was unexpectedly attractive: a new Eddie, away from Rosington Road, away from Angel, away from all the memories; anything might be possible.

But not with Lucy. The police were looking for her. These days there were video cameras everywhere – in banks, building societies, shopping centres. He could not take her anywhere without the risk of being seen.

While he was thinking, his fingers dug restlessly into the contents of the bag. He came up with Carla’s purse. He opened it to count the cash it contained. There were credit cards, too, but he couldn’t use those. Carla was an untidy woman, he thought disapprovingly. The purse was full of things which needn’t be there at all. There were old receipts and credit-card slips, some going back for months. There were books of stamps, now empty. There were library tickets and photographs of small children. There were scraps of paper with telephone numbers and addresses scribbled on them. The woman should have had the sense to buy an address book. He stared at one of the pieces of paper, smoothing it out, his mind elsewhere. Suddenly his eyes focused on the writing:
Sally Appleyard
. Underneath was the address in Hercules Road and the flat’s phone number. There were three other phone numbers: one was Michael’s at work, complete with an extension; the second was in Kensal Vale, judging by the three-digit preface and the third was for a mobile phone.

‘Eddie,’ Lucy said. ‘Is it Christmas yet?’

‘Not for about three weeks. Why?’

‘Have I got to wait till then? For the magic set?’

‘No – not necessarily. Would you like it now?’

‘Can I? Won’t he mind?’

‘Who?’

‘Father Christmas.’

‘No, he won’t. It’s OK for you to have it now.’

He handed her the conjuring set, an oblong cardboard box. On the outside of the box was a colour photograph of a small, fair-haired boy in a long black cape; smiling broadly, he was in the act of tapping an inverted top hat with a wand; what looked like a pink rabbit was peeping coyly out of the hat. Lucy’s fingers tore impotently at the packaging.

‘Let me.’

Reluctantly, she returned the set to him. The ends were held down with Sellotape, which he slit with his thumbnail. He eased the end out and handed the box back to Lucy. She did not thank him. He did not mind. He knew that her entire attention was focused on the conjuring set.

Lucy shook the contents on to the table. They looked much less impressive than in the picture on the box. There was a pink, long-haired toy rabbit about the size of a well-nourished mouse. The wand was cardboard and had a kink in the middle. There was a polythene bag full of oddments, chiefly made of cardboard and plastic. Among them Eddie noticed three miniature playing cards and a purple thimble. Finally there were the instructions, a small booklet with smudgy print on poor-quality paper. Lucy glanced at him and then back at the conjuring set. He guessed that she was trying desperately to preserve her excitement in the face of disappointment. How do you explain to a four-year-old that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive?

‘No hat,’ she pointed out, her lips trembling.

‘Perhaps we can borrow one.’

Eddie tried to think constructively about what to do next. He couldn’t concentrate. He stared instead at Lucy’s hands as they picked their way through the contents of the conjuring set. Her head was bowed. The strange rigidity of her position told its own story.

‘Lucy. Shall I help?’

She looked up. Her face was bright and her eyes gleamed with tears. Wordlessly, she pushed the instruction booklet towards him. He picked it up and opened it at random. The words looked like little insects, flies perhaps. They were moving. Some of them took off from the page as if to attack his mind. Some of the words made phrases.
Astonish your friends
. Why should you want to do that?
Hold card in place with thumb so audience see nothing
. Eddie turned over a page and found more insects, swarming as if feeding from an open wound.
A simple but effective trick
… His eyes slid diagonally across the page.
It will be the Queen of Spades
.

‘I want to do the card trick. Why is it so hard?’

‘I don’t know,’ Eddie said, thinking that it was hard because things were always harder than you thought they were going to be. ‘I’ll see if I can find out how to do it.’

There were three cards provided, about a third of the size of normal playing cards; one of them was double-sided. Eddie struggled to match them up with the instructions and the accompanying diagram. The writer of the booklet seemed to be labouring under the delusion that there were five cards, not three. Nor was English the writer’s first language. While Eddie was working on the card trick, another part of his mind was wondering what he was going to do. His hands were growing colder. They couldn’t stay here indefinitely. It was winter.

‘Hurry up,’ urged Lucy.

She must have had a vision of herself as a magician, looking like the boy on the box and effortlessly astonishing her friends and relations. How could the reality ever measure up to the anticipation? Perhaps it would have been wiser to have made her wait.

‘I think you do it like this.’ Eddie fanned out the three cards in his hand, their faces towards Lucy. ‘You see – the Queen of Spades is the one in the middle.’

She looked blankly at him and he realized belatedly that she did not know what the Queen of Spades was. He laid the cards on the table and explained what each one was called. She nodded, frowning. Then he made up a version of the trick. You showed your audience the three cards and then hid them under the box. Then you waved your wand and said
Abracadabra
. Next you asked the audience to tell you which of the concealed cards was the Queen of Spades – the card on the right, the card on the left or the card in the middle. The audience thought they knew – but you fooled them, because the Queen of Spades was a double-sided card, and you had cunningly turned it over as you slid it under the box. On the other side of the Queen of Spades was the Two of Hearts and you showed them that instead. You made them think that the Queen of Spades had disappeared.

‘Is that all?’ Lucy asked when Eddie had finished explaining.