Rattling the Bones Read online

  ‘I might leave my card,’ said Edna vaguely, drifting off to that other world, or appearing to do so. It was her way of refusing the invitation. She returned disconcertingly to the present. ‘How is your young man?’

  ‘You mean Ganesh,’ I said. ‘He’s not my young man. He’s a friend. He’s very well. He works for his uncle now, a newsagent.’

  Ganesh’s parents had run a greengrocer’s shop in Rotherhithe but they’d been dispersed in the same way as the rest of us and had relocated to High Wycombe. Ganesh had been left behind and scooped up by another family member to be enrolled in another business. I know Ganesh objects to being passed round the family in this way but at the same time, he seems unable to break away from it. It comes under the heading of things that Ganesh Will Not Discuss.

  ‘I was engaged to be married once,’ said Edna in a conversational tone.

  Used as I was to the ‘hop, skip and a jump’ way in which Edna thought, this was so unexpected I took a step back and wondered if I’d heard her correctly. Edna had never ever volunteered any personal information or even given a sign her previous life meant anything to her or that she even had any recollection of it.

  I looked down at her, studying her more closely. It was impossible to tell how she had once looked. The general shape of her face was round but her chin was pointed. Heart-shaped, they call that. Only in Edna’s case the whole thing had sagged. Her eyebrows had fallen out and were represented only by a sparse scattering of grey hairs. She’d compensated by growing a few hairs on her chin. Her eyes were deep-set and heavy-lidded and the eyelashes had gone the way of the eyebrows. Yet I noticed for the first time that her skin was very fine, like a piece of crumpled silk. Perhaps she had once been a very pretty youngster with a heart-shaped face, flawless skin and long eyelashes and someone had fallen in love with her.

  Her brow wrinkled into a furrow. I thought at first she frowned because I was studying her so closely and so rudely. But it was because she was rummaging in her mind.

  ‘I think I was,’ she said, less certainly. ‘I’m almost positive I was. Who could it have been, I wonder?’

  Her gaze drifted past me and sharpened. Her whole expression and attitude changed. Panic crossed her features. Her eyes glittered with fear and their gaze darted about like a trapped animal’s.

  ‘I’m going!’ she said.

  She shuffled sideways and in a burst of unexpected speed outmanoeuvred me. I darted after her scurrying figure and caught her arm.

  ‘Edna? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Can’t stay!’ she said irritably. ‘Go away!’

  Edna twitched her sleeve from my grip and made off, burrowing her way through the crowds like a demented mole. She rounded the corner where the Kentish Town Road meets Camden High Street and wobbled off along the Kentish Town Road until she was lost to sight among the pedestrians and traffic.

  I let her go and turned back to the Camden High Street, looking round to see what on earth could have spooked her like that.

  The usual hustle and bustle went on around me, images flickering and changing like a kaleidoscope pattern. But no, not every shape moved. One thing, or rather one person, was stationary.

  He was standing diagonally across the road, on the far side of the traffic island, on the corner of Parkway in the shade thrown by the frontage of a bank. He was the kind of person you probably wouldn’t notice in the ordinary way of things but once you had noticed him, his image imprinted itself on your brain like a snapshot.

  I can see him now in my mind’s eye, lurking in the shadows, pressed against the bank’s respectable wall. It was as if he was anxious to remain unnoticed but, if noticed, hoped to gain some legitimacy from the business behind him. Everything about him was pale and so still that he looked just a little bit ghost-like. I could see he appeared young, fairly tall and spindly in build and I got the impression of a skin untouched by sunshine even though we’d had quite a lovely hot summer. His clothes were either white or very pale; at a distance I couldn’t be sure which. He wore knee-length shorts with large square buttoned pockets on the sides of the legs. With them he wore a white T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and a white cap with a sharp peak, more like a tennis cap than a baseball cap. He was staring towards the Tube station entrance and me. As soon as he realised I had noticed him, he reacted as quickly as Edna had done, turning and disappearing round the corner, in his case into Parkway, taking him away from the area in the opposite direction to that taken by Edna.

  He should have stayed where he was. I would probably just have dismissed him as one more oddity. Camden High Street is full of eccentric characters. Even if I’d thought he looked a bit suspicious I could have done nothing about it. If I’d marched over there before he slipped away and accused him of watching me and Edna, he could well have replied that I was off my trolley and he was waiting for a mate. Quite possibly he would have tried to sell me drugs. His whole body language spoke guilt but I decided quickly it couldn’t be because he was a pusher and I doubted he was an undercover cop. Drugs Squad turns up in all shapes and disguises but they always look like cops. Partly it’s their standard of physical fitness and very straight posture. They never look relaxed.

  No one would ever mistake me for anyone official. I’m too short, relaxed to a fault, and anyone can see I’m the type usually at odds with authority. This is not by my choice, I might add. It’s just the way things have worked out.

  I act on instinct and it’s not always wise, as my friend Ganesh is fond of pointing out. But I was never one for standing around watching life go by. I want to grab it by the throat. So I took advantage of a gap in the traffic and dashed across the road in pursuit of Ghostly Apparition. I wanted to ask him what his game was and I needed to see where he was going for my own satisfaction. Call it curiosity, call it meddling, call it what you like.

  By the time I got into Parkway he was well ahead of me, walking quickly and purposefully with his arms swinging. In a way I was relieved to see him. At least he was real. I can move, too. I scooted along and came level with him, out of breath and probably red in the face. He knew I was there, knew I’d followed him, but he gave no sign of it other than lengthening his stride. His paleness was now even more apparent. I wondered if he’d been ill that his skin had that fish-belly translucence. His eyes were fixed in a rigid blank stare, apparently seeing nothing, making no contact with anything. I did wonder for a moment if he was schizophrenic and, if so, if he was taking his pills. That was a worry. The only thing I could be sure of was that, without breaking into a trot, he was definitely running away. I wondered if he was making for Regent’s Park. There he could break openly into a jog and soon leave me behind.

  Even this power-walking was doing me in. I struggled for the breath to hail him and managed to croak, ‘Hey!’ but too late.

  Without warning, he wheeled right into Gloucester Avenue and almost immediately right again into Gloucester Crescent. His legs were long and his stride correspondingly so. My legs had to work double time to match his progress. I did my best, wondering, as my breathing became more laboured, how I got to be so out of condition. I pursued him past the curve of expensive homes in the Crescent. That’s how it is in Camden: the wealthy and the homeless are jumbled up together in a unique ecosystem.

  We proceeded at such speed that before I knew it, we were at the top of Inverness Street and he had turned into it. Here the fruit and veg market was busy. My quarry had lengthened his stride even more so that I dog-trotted along gasping in his wake like a fairy-tale character chasing someone wearing seven-league boots. I skidded on squashed fruit. I dodged shopping baskets trailed by doughty old dears heedless whose shins they cracked. Little kids, in and out of buggies, littered my way ahead.

  The man in white had led me round in a circle and we emerged, he still that tantalising distance ahead, into Camden High Street once more. Too late I saw his purpose. He ran across the road and disappeared into Camden Town Market. I realised he was clever and I’d been caught
out.

  In Camden Town Market space is at a premium and visibility down to only the immediate few feet ahead and the stalls to either side. They effectively cut out the light. It is a maze of shadowy narrow alleys between packed merchandise, browsers, tourists and genuine shoppers. He had already vanished among the crowded stalls. I plunged after him although a sinking feeling told me I was probably wasting my time.

  Obstinately I pushed on, stallholders’ cries ringing in my ears, people jostling me in their efforts to reach the goods. Loitering teenagers gathered before a jewellery stand blocked my way as they discussed the merits of strings of brightly coloured beads. Ahead of them I glimpsed a white baseball cap. There he was!

  I thrust the teenagers aside ignoring the glare of the stallholder and the girls’ indignant protests. Brightly-coloured clothing exotic with sequins and glitter dangled from racks and swayed into my face bringing with it the acrid and musty smell of the dyes. Between the racks, from time to time, I glimpsed my quarry or thought I did. A flash of white baseball cap, was that him? Or was it someone else? To anyone watching from above our chase might have appeared as one of those computer games where one character pursues another through a maze strewn with dead ends, obstacles and booby traps. Then he was gone.

  I had been so long in pursuit, sticking to the trail despite all my quarry’s tricks, that at first I would not believe I had really lost him. The realisation that he had shaken me off struck me like a painful blow. I scurried round a few corners, scanned the alleys in vain for a gangling white figure or a baseball cap. People pushed past me. Music rang tinnily in my ears and chatter in half a dozen languages. But I was alone.

  I guessed what he might have done. Probably he had snatched off the tell-tale cap. He had ducked down and cut through the middle of one of the clothing stalls, squeezing between the tightly packed racks out into the parallel alley beyond. He was probably already back in the High Street.

  I retraced my steps there although I knew it was useless. I looked up and down it in both directions but there was no telling which way he had gone. Perhaps even back to the Underground station and even now he stood on some platform way beneath my feet. He knew his terrain and had used it well to outwit me. But it is my terrain too, and I was furious with myself for allowing him to do it.

  In a teeming metropolis you meet and part from people all the time. Lives touch briefly and then, like the proverbial ships in the night, pass and in almost no time at all any sign of that brief interaction has been wiped away traceless. But I’d always remembered Edna and wondered what became of her. She was part of my first foray into detection, even providing me with a clue, and I felt an obligation towards her. So as I stood there, panting, perspiring and hopping mad, I thought, Next time I’ll be ready! I’ll be looking out for you, chum, and I’ll know you! Edna knew you, too . . . and she was scared.

  I’d have been scared, too, if I’d had any sense. But like I was telling you, bad situations draw me fatally towards them.

  Chapter Two

  The unexpected meeting with Edna had reminded me of what I had so recently left behind. I’ve travelled very little in a spatial sense, hardly ever leaving London.That in itself, I suppose, is a bit odd these days. But on the other hand I have done quite a bit of spiritual travelling as I’ve drifted from reasonable normality (if the patched together world of Grandma and Dad could have been considered that) into homelessness and back again.

  For most ‘normal’ people the world of the homeless and kinless is a foreign land yet they only have to step out of their front doors to spot its inhabitants. If they wanted to see them, that is, and most people choose not to. They throw a cloak of invisibility over them and hurry on by.

  This curiously distorted ‘other’ world follows a weird logic. It operates by its own rules, sets out its own patterns and sometimes even keeps its own clock. Whole communities grow up and thrive in derelict properties with eviction hanging over them like the sword of Damocles, impermanence a way of life. Those who really have nowhere else to lay their heads but the street often choose to sleep by day when the thoroughfare is full of busy unheeding passers-by and pollution-spilling traffic. At night, when myriad dangers emerge from the shadows or spill from clubs and bars in drunken hostility onto damp flagstones glistening in the lamplight, the homeless prowl the streets in constant watchful wakefulness.

  People in the ‘normal’ world should never kid themselves that it isn’t easy to slip through the porous boundaries into the world of the dispossessed. Sometimes, if you are very lucky or exceptionally determined, you can make the journey in the other direction and re-enter the lost Eden of acceptable existence, moving from rootlessness to a kind of security, however tenuous. I am one of those fortunate to have made that perilous transition. I’m never unaware of my good luck. I’ve never forgotten those who haven’t shared it.

  ‘I always wondered about Edna,’ I said to Ganesh that evening. ‘You know, where she came from, why she was living in that churchyard.’

  ‘Did you?’ replied Ganesh, turning up his jacket collar against the stiff breeze whistling along the Chalk Farm Road. The wind wasn’t cold, if anything it was warm and the air muggy, but it carried on it a cloud of dust and small pieces of debris that whirled around us like an urban sandstorm.

  ‘Yes, didn’t you?’

  ‘No,’ said Ganesh.

  ‘Come on, Gan, you must have done.’

  ‘You might not have noticed,’ said Ganesh huffily, ‘but back in the Rotherhithe days I spent my entire time selling spuds and onions for my dad. Just like now I spend my life running round on my Uncle Hari’s behalf. Am I appreciated? Am I, heck!’

  I recognised the signs of a family dispute hovering in the background. ‘You’ve quarrelled with Hari,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t quarrel with my uncle,’ said Ganesh with scarcely suppressed fury. ‘It’s impossible. To quarrel with a person you have to get some reaction out of them, right? They listen to you and then they yell at you. You listen to them and you yell at them, right? That’s quarrelling.’

  ‘OK,’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘But I can’t quarrel with Hari because he never listens in the first place !’ Ganesh’s voice rose to a shout. ‘I put my point of view, politely. He ignores it. I repeat it. He says, why am I standing there chattering when there’s work to be done? I ask, again very politely, can I have a little of his attention to discuss something? Oh, he is far too busy. Speak to him later, when the shop’s closed. Only, later, when we’re upstairs in the flat, it’s something else he’s got to take care of.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked sympathetically.

  Ganesh stopped in his tracks and wheeled round to face me. ‘What’s the problem? You’re as bad as Hari. Isn’t what I’ve been describing problem enough?’

  ‘Yes, what I meant was, what is the problem you want to discuss with him and he won’t discuss?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand. It’s a family matter,’ said Ganesh stiffly.

  ‘You know,’ I told him, ‘you won’t like me saying this but in your own way, you’re just like Hari.’

  At this, Ganesh fell into a prolonged offended silence until we reached Potato Heaven.

  All right, I know. It’s an awful name and both Gan and I tried to talk Jimmie out of it but without luck. Jimmie said it would attract the punters and perhaps he was right, because it was always busy these days and Jimmie was generally wreathed in smiles instead of cigarette smoke. He still puffed away doggedly but at least he managed now to keep the fumes out of the eating area.

  When we first knew Reekie Jimmie, as he was affectionately known to all, he ran a baked spud café which made not the slightest concession to customer preferences, pleasant décor, healthy eating or anything else. Then Jimmie decided to go upmarket and went into business with an Italian guy and opened a snazzy pizza parlour. I worked there for a while as a waitress (while rehearsing for a role in a never-to-be-forgotten production of The Hound of the B
askervilles.) There had been just a little problem with the pizza place and the law. But the cops decided Jimmie had been a hapless dupe, he just wasn’t bright enough for crime, and allowed him to go back to his first love: potatoes.

  ‘You know where you are with tatties, right, hen?’ he explained to me.

  But just as living in a hostel had done something for Edna, running the pizza parlour had done something for Jimmie. He had acquired Style. He’d realised that surroundings do matter. So he’d kept on the pizza restaurant premises, complete with the beautiful tiled picture of Vesuvius on the wall, but gone back to spuds, only now they came with Bolognese filling (mince) and Milanese (ham) and one called Four Cheeses (mousetrap). See what I mean?

  When Ganesh and I were settled in a corner with our potatoes, Bolognese for me and Four Cheeses for Ganesh because he’s vegetarian, I returned to the subject of Edna. It seemed safer than trying to talk to Gan about his problems with his uncle. Anyway, Edna was what I wanted to talk about.

  ‘She was really scared when she saw the young guy watching her,’ I said. I’d told him all about it, even how the watcher had given me the slip.