Turquoiselle (11 page)

Ten

Sara, when he
was a young child, had been very good-looking. She was in her mid-twenties
then.

(His
father had been perhaps good-looking too. But excessive drink and bouts of
manic fury, drunk or sober, had cancelled most of that before Andy was five.
And he had scarcely any illusion of it left when Sara and Andy escaped.)

Sara
did not drink seriously. But she smoked cigarettes extensively, forty to sixty
a day. Later, slowly, agonisingly, she gave up, not being able to afford the
rising prices.

By
the time Andy was fifteen, Sara was in her early thirties, and her looks were beginning
to wash off her like make-up.

He
came back that day about 5 p.m., dissociated from his wanderings about central
London; it was an overcast sullen evening, the grey ‘architectural’ buildings
had melded with the sky. Basically, he had run out of things he wanted to do.

At
this point Andreas Carver, (or Cava, like the wine and champagne), seldom or
never visited Sackville Secondary. And coming upstairs to the flat over the
off-licence, he wore his ordinary uniform of jeans, shirt and jacket, which
certainly was not theirs.

Opening
the door – he had a key, as he always had – he saw Sara immediately, sitting on
the skimpy pinkish sofa. As a rule, she was not home yet, not today, but out
cleaning, with a flock of hapless others, the Devonshire Centre off the High
Street. But instead here she perched, nervilly drab in the middle of her
spilling blonde strings of hair. And opposite her, on the best chair, which was
a sort of mottled green-brown in colour, like a shat-on cabbage, was a guy in a
suit.

It
was a curious suit, too. Inevitably, a suit looked old-fashioned, but
conversely it was right up to date, and sharp as a new razor blade. Deep grey,
like the evening, and London, and Andy’s mood. And the mood now in the flat.

Sara’s
pale bony face flashed about.

“Andy,”
she said, desperately, “this is–”

“That’s
OK, Mrs Carver.” The man spoke with total reassuring self-assurance, false as
hell. The sort of voice-over you might expect on the crashing train or plane or
rocket-ship –
No
need to be alarmed. Please stay seated and enjoy the view
. A combine of
rich fudge – and malice – enormous sympathy, empathy – and utter frigid
indifference.

Andy
heard that faultlessly and knew it, even if perhaps he could not, then, have
labelled it with total accuracy.
Faker.
Taker. Snake
.

“You haven’t
been going to school, Andrew, have you.” (Not a question.) “Why’s that?” (And
this
was
a question?
Andy did not reply. The suited man regarded him with a half-smile, not
friendly, nor inviting confidence, nor angry, but something –
something
.) “I think
various people have spoken to you about this, Andrew. And to your mother.
Outlining the possible consequences of your non-attendance.” (Sara had gone
into the kitchen, another miniscule space packed with minute sink, three thin
cupboards, a miniaturised fridge, and an electric cooker of unwilling
temperament – they consumed a lot of takeaways – to make the suit coffee. Andy
had asked for coffee too, but Sara had not acknowledged his request, perhaps
thinking it publically unfitted to a growing youth just fifteen.) “It seems,”
said the suit, “you’re not keen on school.”

You
could not call him a suit, really. He dominated the suit, somehow. At first
it
was what you saw, then you saw
him
, and the suit much less. You only saw
his shirt because it was blue, and his eyes were blue. Vivid blue. Contacts,
maybe. He had brownish hair, well-cut in a way his generation – late thirties,
early forties – favoured – a bit long, loose, hankering back to the liberations
of the Seventies. (It vaguely suggested itself to Andy that in twenty-five more
years he too would be around the age of this man now, and the man would be,
perhaps, in his sixties. Heavy might have pointed this weird sort of actuality
out; Andy, by now often in contact with Heavy, had partially picked up the
peculiar mind-set. Though to Andy, of course, at fifteen, trapped for the
moment in the flat with the suit, it was a floating concept. More immediately
he could smell the coffee, instant and cheap, and below that the faintly greasy
underlay of the room – Sara did not clean thoroughly at home, being worn out by
the work elsewhere. (Or, judging by the sackings, maybe not elsewhere either.)
Beneath the coffee too, there was the well-known rising hint of rotted alcohol.
Last night some gang had had a noisy play-fight under the windows with lager
cans.)

The
suit was called Sunderland.

“You’re
really quite bright,” said Sunderland. “Or so they say. Do you think you are?”

A
fresh question.

Andy
decided to answer.

“No.”

“How
interesting. I’d have said you thought you were
very
bright, too bright in fact to have to
go to classes, or obey stupid rules.”

Andy
stared at him. Then looked away as the over-vivid eyes met his. Andy shifted
slightly. He was glad when the door opened and Sara slunk back in with the
coffee in the big red mug that had only one chip out of it. She had put it on a
large plate in place of a tray, with the packet of sugar and a jug of milk. ‘Gracious
living’ Sara termed that kind of thing, with a sort of mournfully scornful
jealousy.

“Thank
you, Mrs Carver.” Sunderland added nothing to the mug. He sipped the inferior
too-weak brew, did not pull a face, (as the electrician had that time), and set
the mug back down. “Please don’t feel you need to stay, Mrs Carver,” he courteously
told her, a caring prince with his rather thick domestic, “I’m sure you’re
snowed under with stuff to do. Andrew and I are fine.”

Snowed
under. Sara, a jittery, shiny little bug, muttered some incoherent
appeasement, and flitted back into the kitchen. She did not even leave the door
ajar. Frightened all over again, very likely she preferred not to hear, as she
had not when his father had begun to rev up.

“The
thing is, Andrew,” said Sunderland the suit, “We’ve been looking at your record,”
(a vinyl album of hits, a file in police archives, an unbroken achievement at
running the mile in one second), “and you truly have some potential, we feel.
But you’re not going to realise it by skiving off all the time. The teachers at
Sacks, of course, are pure unmoderated shit,” (
what
? Andy found he was sitting bolt
upright, as if pulled by the sparking strings of the unexpected swear word), “so
frankly we don’t blame you for hiking your arse straight out of there and off
to do something worthwhile. At least, that way, you’re learning about real
life, or you are to a certain qualified extent. More than the so-called
curriculum will teach you, definitely.”

A
pause.

Andy
now was staring full-on at Sunderland, and
trying
to catch his eye. And Sunderland, an
accomplished flirt, was gazing instead upwards at a genuine fly that, nervous
as Sara, was skittering along the ceiling.

The
fly and the pause continued.

Sunderland
spoke again. “Why don’t you,” he asked mildly, not glancing Andy’s way, “open the
window so that poor little bugger can get out?”

Like
an automaton Andy rose, reached the window, opened it.

“Go
on,” said Sunderland, conversationally, to the fly, “make a break for freedom
while you can, matey.”

And
the fly let go the stained plaster, whizzed across the narrow space, and shot
through the opening into the dismal onset of evening.

“How
did you do that?” Andy said. As he had said it to Heavy, after the business
with the dog.

“What?
Oh, that. I didn’t. It’s called coincidence. Sit down, Andrew – or do you
prefer Andreas?”

Andy
sat down. Sunderland must know his true original name from the ‘record’.

“Andy,”
said Andy.

“OK.
Andy. You’re fifteen now, aren’t you.” (Also no question. Sunderland knew, that
was all. Knew all of it.) “How about we get you into a college? No, I don’t mean
like a university, and I don’t mean like a fob-off pile of crap. I mean
somewhere you’ll have quite a bit of freedom, access to good tuition from
people who respect you, and a range of choices, or at least up to a point, on
what you learn and how and when you learn it.”

Andy
sat there. None of this made sense.

“Why?”
he said. But only for something to say. He had reached the state of grasping he
would have to respond. Just as the fly had done.

Logical
or not, since the dog, they had hung out together quite a bit, he and Heavy.

Heavy
usually instigated their meetings, if you could call his approaches that. He
would just turn up, arrive. And, after the dog, Andy did not try to get away
from him.

Andy
did not analyse why not, or why he now spent time with Heavy, walking about, or
sitting in the playing fields – when vacated – even sometimes going to see an
afternoon movie, or watching one at the flat when Sara was out. (Andy stole
these films, of course, from
Video Rodeo
, or one of the other hire places
round about. He would have had to steal most of them, as most were over-18,
dark adult horror, psychology, or – if very seldom – rather limpingly mild
porn. But, once seen, and usually only once, he would thieve-them-back,
reintroducing them into the relevant shop, either in exactly the right spot, or
else somewhere unmatched, as if some browser had picked them up and then put
them back wrongly. Somehow the security cameras never seemed to catch him out.
But they were always going wrong, those things. Only now and then he did retain
a movie, and then he would never view it again. There were even so by now exceptions
to his steal-only-worthless (to him) articles. A habit he knew that later, if
ever he had any proper cash, he could break).

Although
Heavy came to the flat then, sometimes, he never did this if Sara were to be
home. On the couple of occasions he found she already was, Heavy simply sloped
away inside a couple of minutes. “
Who
was
that
?” Sara had asked Andy initially, crinkling
her eyes and brows and mouth which, for a moment
made her, he
thought, appear like a stranger and completely ugly. “What,” Sara uglily added,
“are you doing with such an ugly funny-looking lump? He must weigh about
sixteen stones –”

“Eighteen,”
said Andy. This was not a fact.

“Well,”
had said Sara, “there we are, then.” And she gave her hysterical giggle.

Andy
was not offended, he thought, by Sara’s take on Heavy. It was the normal one,
the
popular
one. It had
been his, before. He thought of his father then, for half a minute, big and
overweight, faceless with hatred, smashing Sara against the walls of the other
earliest flats.

While
Heavy though did come into Andy’s home when Sara was absent, Andy was never
invited to Heavy’s domicile, whatever or wherever it was. Nor did Andy ever try
to find out, let alone gain access. Some time after, it came to Andy that he
did not even know who Heavy lived with. His mother was dead; that had been
established by the staff at the Potters Road Primary, even if Heavy always
referred to her as if she were not dead, indeed, often suggested, by reference,
he had recently spoken to her:
I asked my moth-ah about that
,
or
Moth-ah told me there are black swans, and a brown
kind too
– after somebody on the bus the previous day had been talking about swans,
(white). Andy had very little interest in Heavy’s home life. As very little in
his own.

But
Heavy, what he said, his – frankly non-human, even un-
earthly
– perception of
virtually all things – “See, that blackbird is flying up to the moon” – “That
red glass in the church window is from where they spit the comm-onion wine” –
alerted, almost
fascinated
Andy. He no
longer thought of these verbal overflows as errors, or signals of mental
retardation. Heavy was like – what was it? – some oracle or prophet from some
weird past history. What he said made sense some
other
way, or was a sign of things that could
not happen,
happening
– some place or
other. Somehow or other. An alternate reality. Or, they only made Andy laugh.
He
liked
them. Why not?

Heavy’s
physical being too had changed for Andy.