The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper(43)

Arthur looked at the floor.

Mike noticed. “Well, cheers, Jeff, mate,” he said.

Back outside Arthur felt the weight of the bracelet back in his pocket. The visit had left him even more confused. The heart charm couldn’t be new, could it? And he still wasn’t quite sure if Miriam’s mother had been called Pearl. He hadn’t noticed the initials S.Y. before.

“Were you tempted to sell?”

“I don’t know.” He felt a little shaken to learn so much from a stranger, to uncover more clues when he’d thought his search had come to a pause. “I suppose I’d better go.”

“Go where? Do you have a train ticket home?”

Arthur said that he didn’t. He looked around him blankly.

“Do you have anywhere to stay tonight?”

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I suppose I’ll find a hotel.” He couldn’t bear the thought of shacking up in a hostel again.

“Well.” Mike mused for a moment. “You’d better stay at mine, then. It’s not much, but it’s home. Hotels can cost a pretty packet around here.”

This silly adventure of his was muddling Arthur’s mind. He had messed up the head of the man in the café and now he was doing the same to himself. He didn’t want to sleep in a stranger’s house but his whole body felt rigid, as if he was turning to stone. The thought of venturing back into the tube station filled him with dread.

He nodded and took hold of Lucy’s leash.





Mike’s Apartment


MIKE’S APARTMENT WAS sparsely furnished. At the end of a concrete corridor the bottle green wooden door had a hole where it looked as if someone had kicked it in. Inside all the furniture was well-worn and old fashioned. A 1970s coffee table, coated in orange varnish, had a blue-and-white-tiled mosaic top. A sofa with wooden legs was covered with a floral sheet. The floorboards were scuffed and spattered with paint.

Arthur found himself staring at the bookcase. It was six feet tall and fully stocked. There were thrillers, biographies, a Bible and Star Wars annuals. “You have a lot of books,” he said.

“Er, yes, I can read,” Mike said. His voice was prickly.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by that...”

“Oh. Okay.” Mike delved his hands into his pockets. “Sorry. I snapped a little then. You know, when you make a living on the streets, some people automatically think you have no brain power. I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of snotty remarks. I get a bit touchy. I’ll make us a drink. Is coffee okay? I’ve run out of tea.”

Arthur nodded and sat down on the sofa. Lucy leaped up and settled on his lap. He stroked her head and she looked up at him with her orange eyes.

“Where’s next on your travels?” Mike said as he placed two steaming mugs on the table. “What’s the next charm you’re trying to trace?”

“I don’t know. I’m intrigued by the paint palette. And I haven’t thought about my mother-in-law for years. Or perhaps I should just stop searching. It makes my head hurt.”

“You should never give up,” Mike said. “Those charms on your bracelet could be lucky.”

Arthur shook his head. After what he had been through, he doubted it. “Lucky?”

“You know. Lucky charms. Lucy is like my lucky charm.”

“I don’t think so...”

“How old are you, Arthur?”

“Sixty-nine.”

“Well, that’s kind of elderly, but not decrepit. You could have twenty years of life left. Are you really going to waste it planting hyacinths and drinking tea? Is that what your wife would have wanted you to do?”

“I’m not sure.” Arthur sighed. “Before I found the bracelet, I’d be doing just that and thinking it’s what Miriam would have wanted for me. But now I don’t know. I thought I knew her so well, and now I’m finding out all these things that she didn’t tell me, that she didn’t want me to know. And if she kept these kinds of secrets from me, what else did she not tell me? Was she faithful to me, did I bore her, did I stop her from doing the kinds of things that she loved to do?” He looked down at the multicolored rag rug on the floor.

“You can’t stop people doing what they want to do if they really want to do it. Perhaps she thought that her life before you was no longer relevant. Sometimes when you’ve lived a chapter of your life, you don’t want to look back. I lost five years of my life through drugs. All I remember is waking up feeling like shit, or roaming the streets looking to score, or the delirium after I’d shot up. I don’t ever want to look back at that. I want to get back on my feet, get a proper job, maybe find a girl who’s good for me.”

Arthur nodded. He understood what Mike was saying, but it wasn’t the same. “Tell me about your books,” he said. “I’d like to hear about them.”

“I just like them. I still remember one from when I was a child. It was about a bear trying to get into a jar of honey. He never gave up. I thought about that when I was trying to get clean. I had to just keep on trying to open that honey jar.”

“I liked to read to my kids when they were young. My son much preferred my wife to do it, but when I got to do it, it felt really special. I liked the stories, too.”