The Northern Clemency (42 page)

Five weeks after he moved in, the Australian said that he’d got a friend who was looking for somewhere to live. Jane had agreed. This new Australian came to see the flat, with a huge rucksack on his back; all his possessions. She knew immediately that she was making a mistake, and this new Australian somehow made the old one seem less nice. Which was odd, because it turned out that they weren’t really friends at all: they’d only seen each other once or twice before the second one moved in. He was just someone looking for a room.

Far from improving her social life, the lodgers together created a stale, soiled atmosphere. Jane started heading straight for her room when she got home. The two of them started watching hours of television, switching it on, whatever it was, and going on until they went to bed. Or if she came into the kitchen when they were both there, a silence would fall that she couldn’t, with whatever amount of brightness, fill. The flat filled with a sour, masculine smell, of bodies and obscure fluids; the second Australian had a personal neglect that gave the impression of a deliberate personal affront; the streak of black shit in the toilet bowl, the black body hair, embedded in a fatty jelly of what must be spunk in the drain of the shower, the blood-encrusted length of dental floss left on the bathroom shelf; all these she felt deliberately left for her, like the horrible gifts of a cat to its owner.

“My God,” she said.

“Jesus,” the Australian said. “Don’t look. Go and sit in the other room. I’ll call an ambulance.”

“I can do that,” Jane said. She forced herself to turn away, with a physical sensation as if caught in a fierce wind. She had never imagined seeing such a thing. The boy, too, after a gulp or two, shut the door firmly and came after her.

“I haven’t seen him since Saturday,” he said, sitting down, pale with shock. “I thought he was—”

“No,” Jane said.

“I don’t know what I thought. He wasn’t even a friend of mine.”

Jane phoned for an ambulance. Not knowing what else to do, she made a strong cup of tea for them both.

The ambulance arrived; two paramedics, with the useless tools of their trade. They made no astonished or horrified noises, and were
more obviously concerned for Jane and the live Australian. In an hour, the police, surprisingly, arrived, and while the body was being removed, asked a few bored questions. “It must be a shock,” one said kindly. Once the body had been taken away, covered with a red blanket, strapped down on a stretcher, the police went into the room, emerging with an address book. “Don’t disturb anything for the moment,” they said. “We’ll inform his family. Don’t worry, we’ll be tactful about it.” Jane thought of a London policeman, helmet in hand, making the long sad voyage to Melbourne. A stubby, worried couple in their bungalow, hearing the doorbell, and opening it to find the incredible figure of an old-style foreign bobby in front of their neat square little lawn, edged with shrubs in which poisonous spiders lurked, waiting to pounce, under which deadly snakes coiled and loitered … But, of course, it would not be like that. They’d just telephone the details to an Australian policeman to pass on, before forgetting all about the sad and grotesque death, so far from home.

They didn’t need to do anything else much, once the body had been taken away. The police took charge of everything, only letting them know, quite thoughtfully, that the man’s parents wouldn’t be travelling over for the funeral, the cost being too high; he would be cremated and the ashes returned. There was nothing else for it: she and the other Australian would have to go to the funeral to prevent it being an entirely unattended affair.

As it happened, they weren’t alone at the funeral. The same thought had obviously occurred to a few people who had crossed the Australian’s path in London, and the chapel at the crematorium showed three or four clumps of acquaintances, none showing anything more than a straight face. No one offered to read, and there was no obvious principal mourner that anyone could introduce themselves to; so after standing around outside for a while, they all went their separate ways. “Poor bugger,” the other Australian said.

There weren’t, in truth, all that many people Jane could have told. She didn’t tell Sarah Willis, not wanting to make any kind of story out of it, or her mum and dad—there’d be no end of it if she told them. Certainly no one in the head office of the toy company. Every step of the story was ugly, and she didn’t really want anyone to know that any of it had happened to her in any way. It was just too interesting and shocking, she could see that.

“I don’t mind,” Jane said one evening to the Australian. “If you want to move out.”

They’d taken to eating together when they were both in the flat. It wasn’t anything very significant, but she had started to feel a little bit sorry for him. Once, going round the supermarket on her way home, she’d deliberately bought a bit too much and, finding he was in, asked him if he wanted some of her dinner. “It looks good,” he said and, a day or two later, had done exactly the same thing for her, shyly offering a plate of rice and chicken and vegetables, not all that bad.

“What do you mean?” the Australian said. “Is that some Pommy way of telling me I’m not welcome round here any more?”

“No,” Jane said, “not at all. I thought you might be uncomfortable about living here after what happened.”

“I don’t care,” the Australian said. “Well, I do care, but it would be the same anywhere. Poor bugger.”

“Good,” Jane said.

“This is nice,” he said. “Where’d you learn to cook?”

“Anyone can cook,” Jane said. It was just a plate of pasta with bacon and peas and cream. “It’s not hard.”

“You’d be amazed,” the Australian said. “When I was at uni, I used to make this pasta bake, and it was a tin of tuna and a tin of corn, and all sorts of vegetables, whatever you could find, and then you poured a cheesy sauce out of a packet over it and put it in the oven.”

“That sounds incredible,” Jane said. “Did you just invent that?”

“No, it was kind of passed down to me,” the Australian said. “The great tradition of student cooking, passed on from mouth to mouth over the years. I even cooked it for other people, would you believe it?”

“I used to be vegetarian,” Jane said.

“Oh, yeah,” the Australian said.

As if he’d asked why she stopped, she went on, “But one day I just found myself making a bacon sandwich, and I didn’t really care.”

“Yeah, bacon sandwich, you couldn’t give that up and not miss it.”

They ate contentedly for a while.

“The thing is,” Jane said, “I think I was probably only doing it in the first place to be annoying. It used to drive my mother up the wall.”

“Oh, yeah,” the Australian said. “I bet your mother went crazy when she heard you’d started eating bacon sandwiches again the second you’d left home and were having to cook for yourself.”

“You’re right, actually. She put the phone down on me,” Jane said. “My dad thought it was funny. I was thinking—”

“You’re going to have to think about getting another lodger,” the
Australian said, interrupting her. He’d obviously been thinking about it. “There’s no point in putting it off.”

“God,” Jane said.

“Just got to be sensible about it. You can’t help but think about it with the room being empty like that. Put someone else in, and it’ll be their room before you know it.”

“I can’t imagine anyone would want to rent a room where, you know …”

“You’re not thinking of telling them, are you?” the Australian said. “Of course they won’t, if anyone tells them. Jesus, sleep in a room where a bloke wanked himself to death three weeks before? No, I don’t think so.”

The extraordinary normality of the situation kept startling Jane; she placed an advert in the free Australian news-sheet in exactly the same way that she had a few months before, and it cost exactly the same. The girl at the other end of the phone didn’t recognize her details, didn’t say, “So it didn’t work out, then?” or “Yeah, I heard the bloke died with his dick in his fist.” There was no reason to think the advert would be any different from any other advert, and Jane had to admit that the flat, even to her, looked pretty much the same as it had when she moved in. No sinister atmosphere had descended on it; in fact, horribly, it was more as if something had been removed from it, and she and the shy Australian had come together into a baffled domesticity.

That Thursday the Australian surprised her by suddenly suggesting going out to a pub. “Why not?” she said, surprising herself in turn. It would never have occurred to her; she went to pubs so seldom that she hardly saw them, like the way betting shops didn’t impinge on your awareness. But the Australian, it seemed, knew all the pubs in Clapham, wondering out loud about the Prince of Wales, the Sun, the Feathers, the Alexandra before settling on a pub in a back-street, halfway between the square and the doctor’s. Jane had never even noticed it. She wondered if he might be a favourite, a regular at the pub, but they didn’t seem to know or remember him. Perhaps that was just London. They drank steadily, sociably; a large television hung precariously in one corner, and a succession of game shows took place. She quite enjoyed the Australian’s obscene running commentary on all the contestants and presenters and prizes, and when they’d had three or four drinks, she let him teach her how to play one of the gambling machines in the corner. She’d always thought that the point of these machines was to win money, but this one fizzed and bonged without
any suggestion of reward; she called it a “one-armed bandit,” he liked that. It was something to do, the game, with an intergalactic space war.

“They have lock-ins here,” the Australian said, but in fact the pub closed like any other at eleven, the landlady folding her arms and refusing when he tried to ask for another couple of drinks at five past. “I reckon she thinks you look like a policewoman,” he said, returning empty-handed to their table.

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” Jane said.

“Well, you do a bit,” the Australian said.

“No, I don’t,” Jane said. “I think that’s about the rudest thing you could say to a woman.”

“Oh, come on,” the Australian said. “I’m only joshing. It’s the Australian in me. I insult you, and then you insult me back, and then we’re best mates, yeah?”

“That sounds insane,” Jane said. “You want me to insult you back? You really want me to?”

The Australian was about to say yes, but he caught her eye; there must have been some expression in it, something positively alarming. “Maybe not,” he muttered, and they got up and went home.

She’d drunk more than she was used to, but she wasn’t expecting the painful hangover the next morning; woken by the noise of the Australian leaving the house at nine, she raised her head before lowering it again, convinced she was about to be sick. It was eleven thirty before she managed to leave the house. By then, the Northern Line had calmed down from its rush-hour insanity; she actually sat down for once.

“Your friend Sarah Willis called,” her supervisor, Ian, said when she got in. “Are you sure you’re well enough to come in? You look awful.”

“I think there’s something going round,” Jane said.

“Well, stay away from me,” Ian said cheerfully, but he was always sniffing and honking away from some cold one of his three small children had picked up at school or playgroup.

“I took the morning off,” Jane said, into the telephone. “I told them I was sick, but really it was just a hangover. I felt terrible.”

“That’s awful,” Sarah said. “You don’t want to make a habit of that. Listen, I’m really sorry, but you know this evening …”

“Er—oh, God, yes, this evening.”

She’d quite forgotten, but a few weeks ago, they’d looked at the South Bank brochure and decided to go to a concert tonight together. Last year, they’d so enjoyed
Amadeus
at the National Theatre, and
Sarah Willis had said she’d never thought she’d like Mozart so much, they must go to a concert, a proper concert of his music some time. There it had rested until Jane had booked tickets for tonight.

“It can’t be helped. My boss, my big boss, is over from the States and we’re all to go out for a brainstorming dinner with him tonight. I’m really sorry, but you’ll get the money back on the ticket, won’t you?”

There was never anything much like that in Jane’s life. The big boss, her ultimate boss, worked upstairs, and though he was much richer than Jane, he went home to Enfield every night at five thirty. Nobody had ever been known to stay late at the toy-maker’s.

At six, Jane left the office and walked down Southampton Row. It was a sunny afternoon, and the trees on either side cast a bucolic air over everything, even the hooting traffic, even the four tramps who huddled, as always, in their nests of blankets and rags and possession-filled supermarket trolleys under the pillared porch of the disused old church. She walked over Waterloo Bridge, her soft slim brown leather briefcase, much like a music-case, by her side, and felt she looked somehow different from everyone else hurrying over the bridge at this time. It was a beautiful view, the grand buildings lining up along the green flood as if they were holding back something torrential. As if in planned response, a boat hooted, somewhere down towards the City, its blast echoing between the sides of the canyon, and Big Ben replied with its half-hour chime. She was starting to love this city.

Jane took her seat in the concert hall twenty minutes before the start. She knew that was something her father always did, on their rare visits to the theatre or to a
Messiah
at the City Hall at Easter, and she’d always found it ridiculous. But you couldn’t sit in the bar on your own for long, smiling brightly, unless you really were waiting for someone. She put her bag in the thirty-pound empty seat, and realized that Sarah Willis hadn’t offered to pay for the wasted ticket. She read the programme notes, her eyes passing over the superior and baffling explanations, and then, with more pleasure, the adverts, the names of the people playing in the orchestra, the Hollywoodish photographs of the conductor and soloist, the message from the London Borough of Lambeth about fire exits. In time, the hall filled, in pairs and parties, and then, all at once, the orchestra, slouching on in their white ties and tails, a crowd of penguins hovering on the brink of the ice, waiting for the first one to take the plunge. It must be odd to wear such things all the time. From the muddle of sound of an orchestra warming up, little fragments of melody, somehow familiar, as they had one last
chance to try to get an awkward corner right; and then it all fell silent and, like a crowd all gathering round a single object, they agreed on the same note, hooting and responding like the boat on the river.