He drank some water, and ate some sweet cake.
He was tired. He wanted to sleep. He wanted his Mama. But the Mouse didn't seem to understand, so he cried, and kicked the table and threw the plates and cups on the floor. Then he ran into the next room, and threw all the papers he could find in the air. It was nice watching them flutter up and flutter down. Some of them fell face down, some face up. Some were covered with writing. Some were pictures. Horrid pictures. Pictures that made him feel very strange.
They were all pictures of dead people, every one of them. Some of the pictures were of little children, others were of grown-up children. They were lying down, or half-sitting, and there were big cuts in their faces and their bodies, cuts that showed a mess underneath, a mish-mash of shiny bits and oozy bits. And all around the dead people: black paint. Not in neat puddles, but splashed all around, and finger-marked, and hand-printed and very messy.
In three or four of the pictures the thing that made the cuts was still there. He knew the word for it.
Axe.
There was an axe in a lady's face buried almost to the handle. There was an axe in a man's leg, and another lying on the floor of a kitchen beside a dead baby.
This man collected pictures of dead people and axes, which Steve thought was strange.
That was his last thought before the too-familiar scent of chloroform filled his head and he lost consciousness.
The sordid doorway smelt of old urine and fresh vomit. It was his own vomit; it was all over the front of his shirt. He tried to stand up, but his legs felt wobbly. It was very cold. His throat hurt.
Then he heard footsteps. It sounded like the Mouse was coming back. Maybe he'd take him home.
"Get up, son."
It wasn't the Mouse. It was a policeman.
"What are you doing down there? I said get up."
Bracing himself against the crumbling brick of the doorway Steve got to his feet. The policeman shone his torch at him.
"Jesus Christ," said the policeman, disgust written over his face. "You're in a right fucking state. Where do you live?"
Steve shook his head, staring down at his vomit-soaked shirt like a shamed schoolboy.
"What's your name?"
He couldn't quite remember.
"Name, lad?"
He was trying. If only the policeman wouldn't shout.
"Come on, take a hold of yourself."
The words didn't make much sense. Steve could feel tears pricking the backs of his eyes.
"Home."
Now he was blubbering, sniffing snot, feeling utterly forsaken. He wanted to die: he wanted to lie down and die.
The policeman shook him.
"You high on something?" he demanded, pulling Steve into the glare of the streetlights and staring at his tear-stained face.
"You'd better move on."
"Mama," said Steve, "I want my Mama."
The words changed the encounter entirely.
Suddenly the policeman found the spectacle more than disgusting; more than pitiful. This little bastard, with his bloodshot eyes and his dinner down his shirt was really getting on his nerves. Too much money, too much dirt in his veins, too little discipline.
"Mama" was the last straw. He punched Steve in the stomach, a neat, sharp, functional blow. Steve doubled up, whimpering.
"Shut up, son."
Another blow finished the job of crippling the child, and then he took a fistful of Steve's hair and pulled the little druggy's face up to meet his.
"You want to be a derelict, is that it?"
"No. No."
Steve didn't know what a derelict was; he just wanted to make the policeman like him.
"Please," he said, tears coming again, 'take me home." The policeman seemed confused. The kid hadn't started fighting back and calling for civil rights, the way most of them did. That was the way they usually ended up: on the ground, bloody-nosed, calling for a social worker. This one just wept. The policeman began to get a bad feeling about the kid. Like he was mental or something. And he'd beaten the shit out of the little snot. Fuck it. Now he felt responsible. He took hold of Steve by the arm and bundled him across the road to his car.
"Get in."
"Take me —"
"I'll take you home, son. I'll take you home."
At the Night Hostel they searched Steve's clothes for some kind of identification, found none, then scoured his body for fleas, his hair for nits. The policeman left him then, which Steve was relieved about. He hadn't liked the man. The people at the Hostel talked about him as though he wasn't in the room. Talked about how young he was; discussed his mental-age; his clothes; his appearance. Then they gave him a bar of soap and showed him the showers. He stood under the cold water for ten minutes and dried himself with a stained towel. He didn't shave, though they'd lent him a razor. He'd forgotten how to do it.
Then they gave him some old clothes, which he liked. They weren't such bad people, even if they did talk about him as though he wasn't there. One of them even smiled at him; a burly man with a grizzled beard. Smiled as he would at a dog.
They were odd clothes he was given. Either too big or too small. All colours: yellow socks, dirty white shirt, pin-stripe trousers that had been made for a glutton, a thread-bare sweater, heavy boots. He liked dressing up, putting on two vests and two pairs of socks when they weren't looking. He felt reassured with several thicknesses of cotton and wool wrapped around him.
Then they left him with a ticket for his bed in his hand, to wait for the dormitories to be unlocked. He was not impatient, like some of the men in the corridors with him. They yelled incoherently, many of them, their accusations laced with obscenities, and they spat at each other. It frightened him. All he wanted was to sleep. To lie down and sleep.
At eleven o'clock one of the warders unlocked the gate to the dormitory, and all the lost men filed through to find themselves an iron bed for the night. The dormitory, which was large and badly-lit, stank of disinfectant and old people.
Avoiding the eyes and the flailing arms of the other derelicts, Steve found himself an ill-made bed, with one thin blanket tossed across it, and lay down to sleep. All around him men were coughing and muttering and weeping. One was saying his prayers as he lay, staring at the ceiling, on his grey pillow. Steve thought that was a good idea. So he said his own child's prayer.
"Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon this little child, Pity my… What was the word?
Pity my — simplicity, Suffer me to come to thee."
That made him feel better; and the sleep, a balm, was blue and deep.
Quaid sat in darkness. The terror was on him again, worse than ever. His body was rigid with fear; so much so that he couldn't even get out of bed and snap on the light. Besides, what if this time, this time of all times, the tenor was true? What if the axe-man was at the door in flesh and blood? Grinning like a loon at him, dancing like the devil at the top of the stairs, as Quaid had seen him, in dreams, dancing and grinning, grinning and dancing.
Nothing moved. No creak of the stair, no giggle in the shadows. It wasn't him, after all. Quaid would live ‘til morning.
His body had relaxed a little now. He swung his legs out of bed and switched on the light. The room was indeed empty. The house was silent. Through the open door he could see the top of the stairs. There was no axe-man, of course.
Steve woke to shouting. It was still dark. He didn't know how long he'd been asleep, but his limbs no longer ached so badly. Elbows on his pillow, he half-sat up and stared down the dormitory to see what all the commotion was about. Four bed-rows down from his, two men were fighting. The bone of contention was by no means clear. They just grappled with each other like girls (it made Steve laugh to watch them), screeching and puffing each other's hair. By moonlight the blood on their faces and hands was black.