Warlight(11)

Why do I still remember those days and nights at the Criterion—that springtime fragment of a boy’s youth, a seemingly unimportant time? The men and women I would meet at Ruvigny Gardens were more incendiary, became more significant in the path of my life. Perhaps because it was the only time that boy was alone, a stranger among strangers, when he could choose his allies and opponents for himself from those who worked beside him at the sinks or played on the Scratch Ball teams. When I broke Tim Cornford’s nose by accident, he needed to disguise it in order to continue working the rest of the afternoon so he wouldn’t lose his pay. He sat there in a daze, got up, scrubbed the blood off his shirt under a tap, and returned to work repainting a chipped floorboard so it could dry by the time guests arrived. For by six p.m. most of the ground-floor staff would have left the building, like little shoemakers needing to disappear before the real owners returned.

I was pleased by now that The Moth took no interest in how I was surviving the job or what trouble I was getting into. I hid what I was learning, not just from him but from my sister, with whom I had once shared everything. The sexual fables of Harry Nkoma went no further, but the afternoons with Mrs. Rafferty would stay, and there was to be a brief, tentative bond with Harry. I remember us raucous at a couple of football matches we went to, or comparing at the end of an exhausting day our boiled hands and the pucker of flesh on each finger—even on those deft ones that had played the piano so surprisingly, stilling a room of Criterion workers. Where did he go eventually with that skill? He was already middle-aged. For all I knew, Harry would continue to corner others with his stories. But where was the future that Mrs. Rafferty had promised him? I would never know. I lost him. The two of us used to walk to the bus stop if we finished at the same hour. It took me less than thirty minutes to get home. It took him two buses and an hour and a half. It never occurred to either of us to visit where the other lived.





Now and then someone would refer to The Moth as “Walter,” but Rachel and I felt the vagueness of our chosen name for him was more apt. We did not have a stable perception of him yet. Was he really protecting us? I must have longed for some truth and security, much like the six-year-old boy who had once gone to him to escape a dangerous father.

For instance, what was the sieve in The Moth that made him choose these specific individuals who filled our house? Rachel and I gloated with excitement over their presence, even if it felt wrong. If our mother had ever thought to phone us from wherever she was, we would no doubt have lied cautiously and said everything was fine, not mentioning the strangers who happened to be crowding into the house at that moment. They did not in any way resemble a normal family, not even a beached Swiss Family Robinson. The house felt more like a night zoo, with moles and jackdaws and shambling beasts who happened to be chess players, a gardener, a possible greyhound thief, a slow-moving opera singer. If I attempt now to recall the activities of one or two of them, what emerges are surreal non-chronological moments. Mr. Florence, for instance, pumping his “smoker,” which he normally used to calm and stultify his bees, into the face of a guard at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, forcing him to inhale fumes of burning wood combined with a sleep-inducing coal. The uniformed man had his hands held behind his chair as this was happening, and it took a while before his head fell forward, calm as a sleeping bee, so we could walk out of the gallery with two or three watercolours, while Mr. Florence pumped a last gasp of smoke at the unconscious face. “Right!” he barked quietly, pleased, as if he had painted an immaculate straight line, and handed me the hot smoker to put away safely. There are many such incomplete and guilty moments I have packed away, meaningless as those unused objects in my mother’s suitcase. And the chronology of events has fallen apart, for whatever defensive reason.

—

Each day Rachel and I took a bus and then the train from Victoria Station to our respective schools, and for about fifteen minutes before the bell I would mill around with the other boys, talking excitedly about radio shows they’d heard the night before, a Mystery Hour or one of those half-hour comedies where the humour depended almost totally on the repetition of stock phrases. But now I rarely heard those programmes, as our radio listening was constantly interrupted by visitors dropping by to see The Moth, or he would take us around the city and I returned too tired to be curious about another Mystery Hour. I am sure that Rachel, like me, never revealed what our home life had really become—the existence of The Darter, the bee man still under a cloud for his past misdemeanour, and most of all that our parents had “gone away.” I suspect she pretended, like me, to have heard all those shows and so nodded and laughed and claimed to being scared by a thriller neither of us had heard.

The Moth was sometimes gone for two or three days, often without warning. We ate our dinners alone and trudged off to school the next morning. He would mention later that The Darter had cruised by in his car to make sure the place was “not in the midst of a conflagration,” so we had been utterly safe, though the idea of The Darter’s nearby presence on those nights did not give us a sense of security. We’d heard him on other evenings, churning the engine of his Morris—both accelerator and brake pressed down simultaneously—while dropping off our guardian at midnight, and recognized his drunken laughter filling the street as he drove away.

The music-loving Moth appeared blind to the evident anarchy in The Darter. Everything the ex-boxer did was at a precarious tilt, about to come loose. Worst were the crowded car rides when the two of them sat in the front, while Rachel and I and sometimes three greyhounds squabbled in the back on the way to Whitechapel. We were not even certain that the dogs belonged to him. The Darter rarely recalled their names, as they sat tense, shivering, their bony knees digging into our laps. There was one that preferred to lounge round my neck like a scarf, its warm belly against me, and once, somewhere around Clapham, it proceeded to urinate, through either fear or need, onto my shirt. I was supposedly going to a school friend’s house after the dog races, and when I complained, The Darter laughed so excessively he had to avoid hitting a Belisha beacon. No, we did not feel safe around him. It was clear he was just putting up with us and would have preferred we had remained at “Walter’s house,” which was how he referred to our parents’ home. Was this even his car? I wondered, for I noticed the number plates on the blue Morris were frequently changed. But The Moth was content to move in The Darter’s slipstream. Shy people are drawn to such types for camouflage. In any case, the tensions we felt whenever The Moth left home were the result not of our guardian’s absence but of the knowledge that The Darter had permission to oversee us with that grudging, uninterested concern.