I recognized him. “Johnny?” I asked.
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and nodded sullenly. I smiled. A gift from heaven, I thought, snot and all.
“How’d you like to earn fifty pence?” I asked.
Visibly he sized me up. “A pound,” he said.
“Seventy pence?”
“A quid or nuffing,” he said firmly. He folded his small arms together and stood there, facing me, his feet planted stubbornly on the ground.
I knew when I was beaten. I knelt down beside him and explained what I wanted. He nodded. When I had finished, he held out his hand, palm up. Into it I placed a pound coin that rapidly disappeared into his pocket. Then he nodded again.
As agreed, I walked away from him until I had rounded the comer. Then I waited.
Nothing happened. I waited some more-still nothing. I’ve been had I thought. Maybe Tony’s right, I’m no detective. Then suddenly, from around the corner, issued a scream, a bloodcurdling scream, the likes of which I had never before had the privilege of hearing. Once it came, paused, and then once again.
It worked like a dream. I heard a door open and a woman, my woman, call out, “What the hell’s going on?”
She got another scream for a reply and some words this time. “My brovver,” Johnny screamed. “My brovver, he’s stuck.”
“Oh save me,” the woman muttered,
Johnny screamed again.
“All right, all right,” she said. “I’ll get him out. Just do me a favor and stop screaming, will you?”
They rounded the comer at a brisk pace, Johnny leading, the woman following. As they passed me, Johnny let out another yell and the woman quickened her pace, giving him a push as she did so.
I walked fast in the opposite direction, running when I had rounded the corner. I opened the door of her office and stumbled over to her chair. I grabbed her bag and began to rifle through it, one ear on the commotion outside.
It was a bottomless chasm I faced and a messy one at that. I pulled things out at random. The screaming had stopped and I heard the sound of a slap. I had little time left.
The bag was incredible. I dug deep, throwing out old Kleenex, keys, a plethora of credit cards (social workers must be better paid these days, I thought), and the occasional half-eaten nut. None of the contents fitted my preconception of what should be there. I dug again.
I was on the verge of giving up when I found what I’d been looking for-an address book, small and black. Except I was probably too late. I heard footsteps outside.
I opened the book to the P section. No Parsons there. The footsteps were coming closer.
I turned to the T section. And there it was, the name Thelma, no surname, just Thelma. Except it did me no good because underneath the name was a blank piece of paper, stuck on, tight. I know it was tight because I tried to get it off. No luck: I heard a rustling outside the door. So I did what I had to. I pulled the page out, shoved the book along with the rest of the garbage back into the bag, threw the bag over the chair, and ran for the door. I collided with her there.
“Forgot my pen,” I said. “One day I’ll forget my head.” The anger in her face faded. “Tell me about it,” she muttered before closing the door on me.
In a workers’ café across the road I sat over a cup of milky hot water masquerading as tea and stared at the stolen page. There was no way I could remove the covering blankness. I’d tried again and all I’d managed to do was to tear a corner off it.
I turned the paper over. I could see the writing there, faint and inviting, but still indecipherable. I held the page up to the light and it became clearer but still incomprehensible. Well, it would be, I thought. It’s backward.
I left my tea to its own devices and went to the toilet. I held the back of the page up to the scratched mirror above the basin-again the writing appeared, but still illegibly. I got a pen out of my bag and, holding the paper up to the exposed bulb, I slowly started to trace the lines that I could see.
It took a long time, but I managed it in the end. And when I’d finished, I could see, in writing that was not mine, an address, clearly written.
My tea was still waiting for me. I put some coins beside it and left them all to their own devices.
Thelma lived in a small terraced house almost opposite the football ground. Hers was in the middle of a row of look-alikes, all built from dingy gray brick, with lace curtains covering small square windows, low front gardens whose walls could never hold back the tide of litter from the fans, and dark-red-stained front steps that would once, in another age, have been daily scrubbed.
I stood on the steps and rang her bell. I got no response, no sound at all. I rang again but again without luck. I turned to go and it was then that, out of the corner my eye, I saw a portion of the dingy lace twitch. I waited but still nothing happened. I got the message. I turned away and walked back to my car, climbed in, rewed it ostentatiously, and drove off. I drove around the block and then returned to her street, parking a few doors down, away from the lace curtain. I switched off the engine and waited.
It was two hours before anything happened. I concentrated mostly on my business or lack of it. I sat and I boiled and I wondered what I was doing, trapped in my own car on a sunny day, watching the minutes tick by and the money diminish, waiting for a fictional Thelma to make a move so I could report back to the fantastic Mouse. Tony was right, I thought, and Sam as well-it was time to move on, time to reenter the real world.
My hand was on my car keys, ready to switch on and leave, when I heard the footsteps. I ducked down, landing heavily on the floor. I strained my neck as I peered through the side mirror. It was her, all right, the woman from Thelma’s old office, walking briskly down the pavement. She crossed in front of my car, so close that I could almost smell the anxiety emanating from her, and walked purposively up to Thelma’s door.
It was opened almost immediately and kept open. I saw a hint of blue, but otherwise my social worker concealed her protagonist from me. For protagonists they obviously were: I didn’t need to hear their conversation to guess that it was ugly-I could see it in the gestures of the social worker, in the hard set of her back, in the way she reached into her bag and flung something toward the door, in the way she walked away, and in the bang that sounded as the door closed.
I crouched down as she passed by me, but I needn’t have bothered. She walked fast and angrily, lost in a world of her own making, muttering to herself. At one point she stopped and hit herself-quite literally hit herself on the head with the flat of her hand. I heard the sound of the blow from twenty yards away.
She started up again, and only when she had turned the corner did I get out of my car. I ignored the front of the house and instead walked round the block, counting houses until I reached Thelma’s back gate. I pressed against it and it yielded slightly. One long push was enough to break the lock.
I made my way down the narrow path, past the overflowing dustbin and the small outhouse that must once have been the house’s only toilet until I reached the kitchen door. I put my hand on the doorknob, and it opened as if it had been waiting for me. I stepped in.
I found myself in a kitchen that stank of neglect, Dishes were piled on both sides of the sink, unwashed and uncleared. On the floor stood two saucers, one with the dregs of old milk, the other piled high with cat food. Plants wilted on the windowsill, geraniums that instead of enjoying the sun were being finished off by it.
And yet it was not a kitchen that I would ever have described as poor. It was packed with consumer durables, with microwaves, coffee percolators, automatic juicers, stainless steel knives, still wrapped and shining, and a variety of food processors of the latest design. An ideal home gone mad, I thought, as I walked through the room and into the hall.