Mr. Flood's Last Resort(6)

An army of spiders march across my scalp. I feel cursed even to be holding this. Drop it, I say to myself.

But I don’t. I look at the frizz of hair that surrounds the space where her face should be: russet hair, unnaturally bright, backlit by the setting winter sun. I look at the girl’s patent shoes and her legs in red patterned tights and her navy coat. The toes of her feet meet. Pigeon-toed.

I turn the photograph over. The first word is scored out, a series of deeply etched kisses. The caption reads:

Xxxxxxxxxx and Gabriel, Bridlemere, 1977.

An artifact has washed up, knocking, on my shore.

But why my shore?

My shore is strange, inhospitable terrain. It is rock-ringed and uninviting and ruled by odd, unfathomable tides.

Another person, in another time, put their faith in the unknown—in the unseen me. They rolled and stoppered and hoped their message would get through. Someone transmitted: I received.

Would it be churlish to throw it back amongst the flotsam and jetsam and let someone else find it?

Would I dare? In all the mad swill of objects, the house gave me this.

The photograph lies on my palm, turning up at the ends like a fortune-telling fish. It’s telling a bad kind of fortune, of that I’ve no doubt.

I glance around me. At the sodden rubbish, the soaked walls; at limbless Barbie watching me from the corner with one eyebrow raised. Her fuchsia lips mouth one word. Run.





CHAPTER 2




I don’t run at all. I go into the kitchen, close the door, prop a chair against it and select a cast-iron skillet. Testing the heft of it in my hand and placing it within easy reach on the Formica-topped table.

I am professionally obliged to leave Mr. Flood a nutritious dinner. Then I can run.

Today it is steak and kidney pie and potatoes; for afters there is jelly and mandarin oranges. My landlady, Renata Sparks, says I ought to pocket Mr. Flood’s money and serve him dog food and crackers. I tell her I derive a sense of occupational pride from finding a clean plate every morning. Besides, the old man is looking a lot less peaky, still cadaverous, but filling out a little around the eye sockets. Renata laughs through her nose at me.

I also have to feed his clutter of cats before I run.

I’ve named them for all the top writers. Hemingway has half an ear and a rousing meow, Dame Cartland is a sociable Persian with a matted rear end, and Burroughs, dour and sneaky, hisses suspiciously in corners. They are starting to come when I call; they twist themselves around my legs, giving me bubonic constellations of fleabites.

Once or twice I stop, hearing something at the door: a faint cry, a scratching, perhaps not of cats. Once or twice my hand reaches for the skillet. But after all it is nothing. Away from the confinement of the downstairs cloakroom I remind myself of the following:

1. There are more things in heaven and earth, but rarely are they this direct or comprehensible in their methods.

2. I hardly read Biba Morel’s legal disclaimer, but if I had paid more attention I would have noted the words: council raid, booby traps, ingenious mechanisms, police caution.

3. Quick reflexes and heavy cookware will turn the tide in all but the most desperate situations.

Keeping a calm, steady pace, I wash up, put my jacket on, and lock the back door behind me. Fighting the urge to break into a run, I make my way sedately down the garden path. Congratulating myself for reaching the gate in a serene and orderly fashion, I step out onto the street.

And take a deep breath.

Here the pavement is certain beneath my feet and nothing heaves or scurries. Here smells are simple, uncomplicated: the scent of bus fumes, the dwindling waft of a cigarette. Rather than the thick, fierce, mind-shattering, stomach-lifting stench of decades of hoarded refuse, one unwashed old man, one hundred cats, the shit from one hundred cats, and the fecund wreckage of a decaying garden.

It’s funny how humans and care workers adapt. On my first day I thought the reek of Mr. Flood’s house would take the top of my head off. By the end of my shift I could eat a fig roll if I breathed through my mouth.

But I haven’t got used to the uneasiness that haunts me as I catch the bus to work, or the foreboding that grows as I walk from the bus stop, or the dread that drowns me as I step over Mr. Flood’s threshold.

I look back at Bridlemere from the gate. From the street it’s a wall of dark green, a forest of leylandii grown up around Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

The only way in now is through the back gate, past satellites of sheds and decaying outhouses. Along a path lined with dismembered bicycles, eviscerated mattresses, and abandoned car batteries. Step off the path and you will allegedly find a walled garden, an icehouse, a well, and a gate lodge with mullioned windows. Keep to the path and you’ll reach the rear of the house with the conservatory to your right. A miniature glass cathedral, all pointed spires and arches, its panes fogged with whorls of whitewash and greened with moss. The lower windows of the house have been blinded: shuttered or newspapered to a height. A flight of iron steps leads to the back door, the kitchen, the scullery, and the pantry.

The house has four stories and at the top there is a belvedere, a long glazed gallery, which, if I ever got to it, would give me a view of the whole of London. From there I would see the wing-tips of the planes landing at Heathrow or the masts of the boats in Greenwich. From there I would see the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace or a pigeon shit on Nelson’s Column.