The Twisted Heart (25 page)

Joe rose to his feet, and said, with a touch of anxiety, ‘You do remember Buddy will probably be imagining you've had a chance to check out this diary of his, or whatever it is?' 

Buddy looked crushed in the bright lights of the kitchen.

‘Do you think we need to get the chimneys swept?' Joe asked him. ‘I laid a fire a couple of days ago, then wasn't sure I dared light it.'

‘I remember last time they swept the chimneys here,' said Buddy, ‘thirty, forty-odd rooks showed up. Set up a right old rumpus.'

‘When was that?'

‘A while back. Ten years?'

‘Ah.'

‘The downpipe from the gutter's loose by my bathroom,' said Buddy. ‘I'd fix it, but I'm getting a bit past it these days.'

‘You're hardly past it,' said Joe; and then, to Kit, ‘Buddy's a pillar of the bowls club on the Marston Ferry Road.'

‘Oh, a toothpick,' said Buddy, tucking himself in at the table. ‘No, it's a shame you have to be
old
when you're old.'

‘Maybe tomorrow or Sunday I can look at it for you?'
said Joe. He boiled the kettle and they helped themselves to the good food he'd spread out on the table.

Kit kept quiet as their conversation turned to Frank, his virtues, and, tenderly, his failings; to building management; to the French people downstairs.

‘And another thing: he couldn't write, you know,' said Buddy, interrupting himself.

‘Really?'

‘Illiterate. It's more common than you think. Didn't mean he was any less than he was.' He turned to Kit, visibly connecting one thought to another. ‘You've not had a pop at my letters, then?'

At Joe's suddenly controlled expression, Kit allowed herself a smile. ‘They're—' she grinned at them both, ‘Buddy, what can I say? They're absolutely fascinating.'

Joe's shoulders dropped with relief.

Kit pulled a naughty face at him. ‘They're amazing,' she said. ‘I read them last night till three o'clock in the morning. I haven't quite finished them yet, but blimey.'

‘Bloody unbelievable what they went through,' said Buddy gruffly.

‘I know,' she replied.

Joe glanced from Buddy to Kit and back. ‘This is—the First World War?' he asked.

‘Yes, the Macedonian Front,' said Kit, ‘push to retake Serbia, defeat the Bulgarians, or “Bulgars” as they said back then; win over the Greeks, whose king was vacillating and probably servicing the Germans and so on. As for the people down in Salonika, fat lot of help, knifed the British soldiers who went in with money for supplies. But the
fighting conditions, God, were unbelievably bad—dreadful: typhoid, dysentery, sand flies, poisonous snakes, malignant malaria, heat so intense they could barely move. And then in the winters it was wolves, floods, boils, trench foot, and such cold that some nights half their horses would freeze to death.' Kit made a gesture to Buddy, a motion asking him if he wished to take over the talking. But he preferred to hear someone else explain; basked, really, in Kit's outpouring. And so, for his pleasure, she continued.

‘—and he's very surprising about Christianity,' she said, after a while. ‘He says it's pure bunk to call the average Tommy a Christian. He says, they're the best men in the world, immensely tough and uncomplaining, but also completely immoral, in that in their death throes they were most likely to ask him not for spiritual solace but for a cigarette. He gets quite depressed about this and says, “I hate the Anglicans”, even though he is one; and that the funeral service in the
Book of Common Prayer
just doesn't begin to serve when you're in a mud slide on the side of a mountain burying a man who has a wife and five children at home, and whose intestines have just been ripped to pieces because a bullet happened to hit his ammunition pouch. Added to which, worse than that, the—' Kit halted because Joe's mobile was ringing in his pocket.

He pulled it out, listened to a voice that sounded to be apologising, and then spoke simply to confirm a plan, it seemed, that had just been proposed to him.

Buddy and Kit sat in silence, the mood at the table deteriorating fast as, for all his intentness, Joe grew palpably distressed.

‘Shit,' he muttered as he rang off. ‘Buddy,' he leant over and patted the old man's arm, ‘I'm so sorry, but Humpty's—'

‘Right you are,' said Buddy.

‘You two please carry on.' Joe got up from the table and started to walk towards his bedroom.

‘Time I was off anyway,' said Buddy. ‘Oh, Joe?' Buddy swallowed down the rest of his cup of tea. Kit could see that Joe was frustrated by this—he was trying to get out of there. ‘Could you,' Buddy rested his cup neatly beside his plate, ‘lend me a couple of matches?'

‘Not a problem.' Joe stalked back over to a drawer and got out a multipack of matchboxes. ‘Help yourself.'

‘I can just—I only need—'

‘Please, take a box, Buddy, or, just do what you like.' Joe went out of the kitchen.

Buddy, raising his voice, called, ‘Right-o, I owe you a box of matches, then.' He sniffed. ‘Lower than the lizards,' he said. ‘I've no time for that lad any more, none. Joe's too soft on him. Other night, he was sick outside my door. I heard this commotion, thought we were being burgled. And it's not just drink,' he said. ‘He's all right, but he's not right up here. He's a bit touched, in old money.' He tapped the matchbox against his skull.

‘Humpty? I know,' said Kit.

‘Joe's a wonderful boy, but, saying that, he's too good to him. It won't do in the end. Tell you what, though, put Humpty in the army, that'd soon sort him out.' Buddy stood up at last, ‘I'll be off then. Nice talking to you. Regards to Joe. Keep the letters as long as you want.'

Kit was almost amused by the crazy idea of sticking Humpty in uniform. ‘We'll have the other half of our conversation soon, yes?' she said. ‘I'd love to finish reading these. Apart from anything else, I now feel like I need to make it to the end of the war.'

Buddy gave a deep nod, then shuffled off. He was more crumpled-seeming even than he had been when he arrived.

‘Gone?' said Joe, walking back in as the front door clicked shut—like stage comedy, Kit thought, standing up herself.

‘Yes, just,' she said.

‘Kit, I'm sorry, but I think I'm going to have to jump on my bike, go looking.'

‘For Humpty? Where?' she said. ‘Should I come? I mean, can I meet you somewhere?'

‘You don't have to,' he said. ‘If you'd prefer to keep out of it, I understand. It's not going to be any fun. That was Pauly. I—I don't know what to say.'

‘Where will you look?'

Joe stepped out into the hallway. ‘He thinks I may find him at The Chequers, in Jericho? Apparently it's been mentioned. I don't know, but I'm going to go and see. You know it?'

Kit nodded. ‘Can you tell me what this is about?' she asked, unable to help herself; but at Joe's reaction, she said, ‘No, no, sorry. That's okay. You just go.'

‘By the way,' he said in a different voice, ‘you'd read masses,' pulling on his coat and glancing brightly at her.

‘I didn't want to let you down.' She twinkled back at him. ‘Besides, they were genuinely interesting. I'm sorry if I went on a bit. You know, you always could have stopped me.' She put a hand to the wall, and watched as Joe checked
through his pockets to see he had everything he needed.

‘Well,' he replied, only partly concentrating now, ‘I'm sure you made Buddy's day—week, probably. Month.'

‘A pleasure,' said Kit, ‘and since you'd invited him anyway—'

‘Ah, but no,' Joe stooped to tuck his trouser leg into his sock, ‘the truth is, he invited us first, but I told him to come upstairs. If you go to tea with Buddy it all tastes of washing- up liquid.' Joe opened the flat door, then lingered to look at Kit again, until she felt unequal to his gaze.

‘He invited me too?' she said.

‘He did.'

‘Is that a, more or less,' she stepped forwards, ‘I don't know why I care, but, a back-handed—blessing?'

‘I dare say.'

‘You go. I just need the loo. And then I'll probably follow along to The Chequers?'

‘You don't have to, Kit, Christ knows.'

Again straying onto thin ice, she said, ‘Your hand—'

‘I don't intend to use it for dastardly purposes.' He took a piece of junk mail off the hall chair, pulled a pen out of his coat pocket and scribbled down his mobile number, it looked like. ‘If I'm not there, call me. I have no idea where I'll try after that.'

‘You go,' she said. ‘That's fine. Don't mind me.'

And so he went, and Kit was left standing all alone. 

She recognised no one at The Chequers, close to full as it was. Joe must have been and gone again. On her walk over there, Kit had been forced by a couple sharing an umbrella
to edge into a bush that overhung a fence, so that her right sleeve was now sodden. She tried to shiver off the chilly drizzle that had fallen relentlessly the whole way. After a moment's pause to take stock, she went up to the bar and bought herself a half, then sat at the only free table, small and clunky—it had three stools ranged round it in a manner to suggest that they had only just been vacated. Lucky to get a table. Joe had told her to phone him, but what if he was caught up in a—what, an
incident
?

She was too late: she had arrived too late. She decided to drink her drink and simply calm down for a minute. The two people nearest her, women, were catching up on news of a sister, a grandchild; news of work. One of them was a cleaner.

‘Does your mum—she still go to the bingo, then?'

‘She's got this ulcer on her leg, so it's been a couple of months.'

‘How old is she?'

‘Yes—she's eighty-five.'

‘Denny still living with her?'

‘That's right.'

A young man walked past and swiped one of Kit's spare stools. Useless to protest, and who could say she needed it?

‘—holiday in three years. Weekends, though. September, Mary stopped in with her.'

Why did I come here, anyway? Kit thought. Why, through the rain and the cold? She pushed her wet hair back, drank fast and kept looking at the door, until a second young man asked about the remaining free stool. ‘You wanting this?'

To answer ‘no' would constitute a— ‘Would you be wanting this?' he repeated—sad admission, Kit felt. In reply, therefore, she stood up, attempting to look haughty, and headed for the door, and would have walked right out, except that as she reached it, one of the barmen came in from outside—blundered in, blocking her way as he said loudly, though not shouting, just loudly, ‘Man down, boss. I don't know if you want to call—I think—might—' Kit was already an obstacle to— ‘want to fetch—' people who were trying to cram past her the other way, round her and the barman and out.

She unlodged herself and went in their train: what a day, what was she being caught up in now?—all of them, her included, making for the alley to the side of the pub; she, in the tail end—had been leaving anyway. The rain was worse. Kit, at the back, caught just in time a glimpse, through the upright bodies ahead of her, of a single figure dropping, smeared with blood, gobs of it, red on a white shirt, dropping defencelessly to the ground; heard, in a moment of common arrest, so it seemed, the sickeningly soft thud as it hit the wet tarmac. A second man was being dragged away backwards from the blow he had just delivered, the scarlet on his fists diluting in the rain; against his will he was being dragged back struggling and yelling, ‘Bastard', and, ‘You fucking wait', over the noise—Kit turned—of a van door being slid open. She watched as he was bundled in, sandwiched between the driver and another man who climbed in after him. He grinned and made a telephone sign through the windscreen to someone still on the pavement,
call me
—before being driven, with a gratuitous wheel screech, away.

A latecomer jostled Kit against the young man in front of her— ‘Sorry,' she murmured—who wiped the wet off his face and remarked, ‘He's a dog's back leg, that one.'

‘A what?' she said.

‘Shouldn't have stood back up again. Should have stayed down,' he said. ‘A total fucking cock-up, less muscles than a fart.'

Kit looked along the street and jumped—and felt a wish to protest her innocence—as she saw Joe swerve up on his bike. He flung it aside, scattering a puddle, and pushed through the small crowd to the front. The mass murmuring of interest and derision dimmed a little and then revived. How, Kit thought desperately, could it not have occurred to her, not have occurred to her, not have struck her, she had been so sure she was too late—how could she—fool,
fool
, and
three
, and
four
—not have seen, understood, that the young man laid out in the alley was—it
was
—she bent down, looked through an assembly of knees at the blood-stained figure, registered the dark, curly hair, a useless hand: Humpty.

She stood up again in slow motion, feeling old, with vomit rising in her throat, gazed blankly at the assorted watchers, and became aware of an impulse to explain to them that she belonged to this scene. Another murmur arose. In Joe's wake swung a sinister and hideous, caramel-coloured Rover. It floated forth out of the rain, rumbling like a pleasure boat, with Donald at the helm. His off-white eyeballs swivelled as he drove the vehicle by inches down the alley, causing the crowd to swear in annoyance as it was forced to shunt those self-same inches this way and that, reforming itself into a differently shaped blot.

Two young men stooped to help Joe shift Humpty's resistless carcass onto the plasticated back seat of the car. There was wet and blood everywhere. Kit pushed forwards, opened the front passenger door and bent in. Donald, chatting on his mobile, nodded at her to take the seat beside him. ‘Ta, bye,' he said and dropped the phone into his lap, before asking cheerily, ‘All right back there?' checking Humpty in the rear-view mirror. ‘Got caught with the wrong girl—finally,' he said to Kit, patting his phone. ‘She got done first, had her arm broken. Not sure about this one,' he indicated Humpty, ‘what a fucking nutcase. I tell you what, though, she had it coming, always fooling around, trying to get blokes interested. We was at school together,' he said.