This is a true story, pretty much. As far as that goes, and whatever good it does anybody.
It was late one night, and I was cold, in a city where I had no right to be. Not at that time of night, anyway. I won’t tell you which city. I’d missed my last train, and I wasn’t sleepy, so I prowled the streets around the station until I found an all-night café. Somewhere warm to sit.
You know the kind of place; you’ve been there: café’s name on a Pepsi sign above a dirty plate-glass window, dried egg residue between the tines of all their forks. I wasn’t hungry, but I bought a slice of toast and a mug of greasy tea, so they’d leave me alone.
There were a couple of other people in there, sitting alone at their tables, derelicts and insomniacs huddled over their empty plates, dirty coats and donkey jackets buttoned up to the neck.
I was walking back from the counter with my tray when somebody said, “Hey.” It was a man’s voice. “You,” the voice said, and I knew he was talking to me, not to the room. “I know you. Come here. Sit over here.”
I ignored it. You don’t want to get involved, not with anyone you’d run into in a place like that.
Then he said my name, and I turned and looked at him. When someone knows your name, you don’t have any option.
“Don’t you know me?” he asked. I shook my head. I didn’t know anyone who looked like that. You don’t forget something like that. “It’s me,” he said, his voice a pleading whisper. “Eddie Barrow. Come on mate. You know me.”
And when he said his name I did know him, more or less. I mean, I knew Eddie Barrow. We had worked on a building site together, ten years back, during my only real flirtation with manual work.
Eddie Barrow was tall, and heavily muscled, with a movie star smile and lazy good looks. He was ex-police. Sometimes he’d tell me stories, true tales of fitting-up and doing-over, of punishment and crime. He had left the force after some trouble between him and one of the top brass. He said it was the Chief Superintendent’s wife forced him to leave. Eddie was always getting into trouble with women. They really liked him, women.
When we were working together on the building site they’d hunt him down, give him sandwiches, little presents, whatever. He never seemed to do anything to make them like him; they just liked him. I used to watch him to see how he did it, but it didn’t seem to be anything he did. Eventually, I decided it was just the way he was: big, strong, not very bright, and terribly, terribly good-looking.
But that was ten years ago.
The man sitting at the Formica table wasn’t good-looking. His eyes were dull and rimmed with red, and they stared down at the tabletop without hope. His skin was gray. He was too thin, obscenely thin. I could see his scalp through his filthy hair. I said, “What happened to you?”
“How d’you mean?”
“You look a bit rough,” I said, although he looked worse than rough; he looked dead. Eddie Barrow had been a big guy. Now he’d collapsed in on himself. All bones and flaking skin.
“Yeah,” he said. Or maybe “Yeah?” I couldn’t tell. Then, resigned, flatly, “Happens to us all in the end.”
He gestured with his left hand, pointed at the seat opposite him. His right arm hung stiffly at his side, his right hand safe in the pocket of his coat.
Eddie’s table was by the window, where anyone could see you walking past. Not somewhere I’d sit by choice, not if it was up to me. But it was too late now. I sat down facing him and I sipped my tea. I didn’t say anything, which could have been a mistake. Small talk might have kept his demons at a distance. But I cradled my mug and said nothing. So I suppose he must have thought that I wanted to know more, that I cared. I didn’t care. I had enough problems of my own. I didn’t want to know about his struggle with whatever it was that had brought him to this state—drink, or drugs, or disease—but he started to talk, in a gray voice, and I listened.
“I came here a few years back, when they were building the bypass. Stuck around after, the way you do. Got a room in an old place around the back of Prince Regent’s Street. Room in the attic. It was a family house, really. They only rented out the top floor, so there were just the two boarders, me and Miss Corvier. We were both up in the attic, but in separate rooms, next door to each other. I’d hear her moving about. And there was a cat. It was the family cat, but it came upstairs to say hello, every now and again, which was more than the family ever did.
“I always had my meals with the family, but Miss Corvier, she didn’t ever come down for meals, so it was a week before I met her. She was coming out of the upstairs lavvy. She looked so old. Wrinkled face, like an old, old monkey. But long hair, down to her waist, like a young girl.
“It’s funny, with old people, you don’t think they feel things like we do. I mean, here’s her, old enough to be my granny and…” He stopped. Licked his lips with a gray tongue. “Anyway…I came up to the room one night and there’s a brown paper bag of mushrooms outside my door on the ground. It was a present, I knew that straight off. A present for me. Not normal mushrooms, though. So I knocked on her door.
“I says, are these for me?
“Picked them meself, Mister Barrow, she says.
“They aren’t like toadstools or anything? I asked. Y’know, poisonous? Or funny mushrooms?
“She just laughs. Cackles even. They’re for eating, she says. They’re fine. Shaggy inkcaps, they are. Eat them soon now. They go off quick. They’re best fried up with a little butter and garlic.
“I say, are you having some, too?
“She says, no. She says, I used to be a proper one for mushrooms, but not anymore, not with my stomach. But they’re lovely. Nothing better than a young shaggy inkcap mushroom. It’s astonishing the things that people don’t eat. All the things around them that people could eat, if only they knew it.
“I said thanks, and went back into my half of the attic. They’d done the conversion a few years before, nice job really. I put the mushrooms down by the sink. After a few days they dissolved into black stuff, like ink, and I had to put the whole mess into a plastic bag and throw it away.
“I’m on my way downstairs with the plastic bag, and I run into her on the stairs, she says Hullo Mister B.
“I say, Hello Miss Corvier.
“Call me Effie, she says. How were the mushrooms?
“Very nice, thank you, I said. They were lovely.
“She’d leave me other things after that, little presents, flowers in old milk-bottles, things like that, then nothing. I was a bit relieved when the presents suddenly stopped.
“So I’m down at dinner with the family, the lad at the poly, he was home for the holidays. It was August. Really hot. And someone says they hadn’t seen her for about a week, and could I look in on her. I said I didn’t mind.
“So I did. The door wasn’t locked. She was in bed. She had a thin sheet over her, but you could see she was naked under the sheet. Not that I was trying to see anything, it’d be like looking at your gran in the altogether. This old lady. But she looked so pleased to see me.
“Do you need a doctor? I says.
“She shakes her head. I’m not ill, she says. I’m hungry. That’s all.
“Are you sure, I say, because I can call someone, it’s not a bother. They’ll come out for old people.
“She says, Edward? I don’t want to be a burden on anyone, but I’m so hungry.
“Right. I’ll get you something to eat, I said. Something easy on your tummy, I says. That’s when she surprises me. She looks embarrassed. Then she says, very quietly, Meat. It’s got to be fresh meat, and raw. I won’t let anyone else cook for me. Meat. Please, Edward.