Transit(17)

I asked whether any of those fears had been realised and he was silent for a moment. I watched him in the mirror, his arms crossed over his stomach, where the faint paunch stood out from his wolf-like frame.

Obviously at the beginning, he said, they’d had some moments. He had to teach his nephew to do things as he liked them done, and nobody learns in an instant: he of all people knew that, from training up novices at the salon. You need time, he said, time and consistency. But it had been two months now, and they rubbed along together quite well. The boy had found work as a trainee mechanic; he had a bit of a budding social life, and even came out clubbing with Dale on occasion.

‘When I can be bothered to put away the pipe and slippers,’ Dale said, ‘and haul myself out the door. Shared life,’ he went on, ‘can never be the same as being on your own. You lose something,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know if you ever get it back. One day he’ll leave, and the thought has occurred to me that I’ll probably miss him – that the place might feel empty, where before it felt complete. I might have given up more than I bargained for,’ he said. ‘But you can’t stop people coming in,’ he said, ‘and you can’t ask what’s in it for you when they do.’

He crossed to the reception desk to get his phone, and I looked at the boy in the chair beside me, whose wild dark hair was now cropped short. He was shooting frequent, imploring looks at his mother, who remained determinedly absorbed in her book.

‘That’s coming on nicely,’ Sammy said to me. ‘You going anywhere special tonight?’

I said that I wasn’t, though I had to go somewhere the following evening.

‘You’re usually good for two or three days if he styles it properly,’ Sammy said. ‘You should be all right. Right then,’ she said to the boy, ‘let’s have a look at you.’

She put her hands on his shoulders and faced him in the mirror.

‘What do you think?’ she said.

There was no reply.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘what have you got to say for yourself?’

I saw the boy’s mother glance up from her book.

‘We’ve got a right one here,’ Sammy said. ‘A right man of mystery.’

The boy’s knuckles were white where they gripped the armrests of his chair. His sallow face was clenched. Sammy released her hands and in an instant he had sprung to his feet and was tearing off the nylon gown that was fastened around his shoulders.

‘Take it easy!’ Sammy said, stepping back with her palms raised. ‘There’s expensive equipment in here, you know.’

With strange, lunging movements the boy strode away from the chair towards the big glass door. His mother got to her feet, the book still in her hand, and watched as he yanked the door open and the black rainy street with its hissing traffic was revealed. He had pulled the handle so forcefully that the door continued to revolve all the way around on its hinges after he had let it go. It travelled further and further, until finally it collided heavily with the tiers of glass shelving where the haircare products stood in their neat rows. The boy stood frozen in the open doorway, his face lit up, his cropped hair as though standing on end, and watched as the bank of shelves disgorged a landslide of bottles and jars which fell and rolled with a great thundering sound out across the salon floor, and then itself collapsed in a tremendous shrieking cascade of breaking glass.

There was a moment of silence in which everyone stood absolutely still, Dale with the phone in his hand, Sammy holding the boy’s discarded cape, the mother with the book clasped in her fingers; even the Glamour-reading woman finally looked up from her magazine.

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Sammy said.

The boy shot out through the doorway and disappeared into the wet, black street. For a few instants his mother stayed where she was, in the glittering field of bottles and broken glass. She wore an expression of stony dignity. She stared at Sammy, her eyes unblinking. Then she picked up her bag, carefully put her book in it, and walked out after her son, leaving the door open behind her.





The trees were a mixed blessing, Lauren said. Their massive forms, hulking in the darkness like ogres or giants, stood everywhere in the town. They rose towering amid the buildings and along the roadsides: she had to admit they were quite dramatic. Where we were walking the thick trunks were driven like piles into the pavements, so that the slabs rose up and down in a series of undulations with the pressure of the roots from underneath. Some of these roots had penetrated to the surface: their blind, snake-like forms, thicker than a human arm, lay impacted in the stone. They were a constant tripping hazard, Lauren said; and at this time of year, when the leaves started falling, the whole centre would be carpeted two or three inches deep in foliage that got so slimy the place became an ice rink.

She asked whether I had had a pleasant journey from London, despite everything. The branch line was the problem: the London train only had to be delayed by a few minutes for you to miss the connection. It happened all the time, and it was hard to run a literary festival when the authors – through no fault of their own, of course – turned up late. But the town’s inaccessibility, she conceded, was also its beauty: the winding route through dense wooded valleys, the chasm-like glimpses of river and hillside as the train wound deeper and deeper into the lofty emptiness, was spectacular. She herself usually drove, for the sake of convenience. But the train journey was very nice.