Now Adam turned over, the leather sofa squeaking beneath him like a nest of fledglings, and he saw that the TV was still on, though soundless. Groomed, smiling people relaying news of world events. He sat up, immediately aware of his foul mouth and dull headache, and went through to the bathroom to wash his face and clean his teeth. He pulled on his jacket and put on his shoes before knocking on Vladimir’s door to let him know he was popping out for a spot of breakfast. He thought he heard Vladimir give a muted groan in reply, but couldn’t make out if anything intelligible had been said. He didn’t want to even try to imagine how Vladimir must be feeling this morning — he suspected there had been a few more pulls at the monkey-pipe before unconsciousness had claimed him.
Adam bought a newspaper, found a caff and ordered tea, toast and a Full English breakfast (two fried eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, mushrooms, tomatoes and chips) and duly consumed it. Replete, and feeling marginally better, he wandered off to Mile End Park and thought he might just lie down on the grass for a minute or two. Three hours later he woke up and staggered home to Oystergate Buildings.
Vladimir still wasn’t up and this time he didn’t reply when Adam knocked. Adam watched horse racing on TV for a while and made himself several cups of tea. The kitchen was marginally better furnished: Adam had bought a kettle, saucepan, two mugs, two plates and two sets of knives and forks — like an impoverished young couple setting up their first home, he thought. There was no fridge, as yet, so the milk was kept on the window sill.
He sipped his fourth mug of tea wondering, thinking about what to do. He could live on here in Oystergate Buildings, he supposed, certainly for a while, and continue his profitable begging life. He was earning more as a part-time beggar than Vladimir would in gainful employ as a hospital porter and, moreover, he had plans for some more audacious variations on the ‘lost blind man’ sting that served him so well.
Or perhaps he should leave the city and go north, as he had told Mhouse — actually go to Edinburgh, to Scotland. They had blind people in Scotland — he could beg as well there as here. But there was something about London that he needed, he realised, something basic and fundamentaclass="underline" he needed its size, its great sprawling scale, its millions of denizens, the utter and protective anonymity it provided. He thought about the 600 people a week that went missing in this country, the boys and girls, the men and women, who walked out of their front doors, closing them behind them, knowing they would never return, or who climbed out of back windows and ran off into the night to join that vast population of living ghosts that were The Missing. Two hundred thousand missing people — and most of them would be in London, he reckoned, subsisting, like him, under all the categories of social radar — living underground, undocumented, unnumbered, unknown. Only London was big and heartless enough to contain these lost multitudes, the vanished population of the United Kingdom — only London could swallow them up without a qualm, without demur.
No, he thought, he would take it — in line with the cliche — one day at a time. As long as Vladimir kept his monkey habit under control (no police raids, thank you) he was safe enough in Oystergate Buildings. Life could continue in its reliably haphazard way. Thinking of Vladimir, he made him a cup of sweet tea and knocked again on his door.
“Vlad? I’ve made some tea, mate.” He pushed the door open. “Let’s go and buy some—”
It was immediately obvious that Vladimir was dead. He was lying on the mattress, twisted round, one arm flung wide as if reaching for one last time for his monkey-pipe and smoking gear. His eyes were open and so was his mouth.
Adam stepped back out of the room and closed the door. He was trembling so much that tea was sloshing out of the mug. “Fuck, no,” he groaned out loud, “no, no, no.” Cursing his misfortune, his stinking bad luck — and then guilt overwhelmed him: the horrible thought came to him that he might have saved Vladimir. When he’d gone out for breakfast he was sure he’d heard Vladimir moan something. Perhaps he had been alive then, in extremis, but alive and was calling for help. If he’d gone in at that point he might have been able to help — summon a doctor, call an ambulance. But all this retrospection was pointless, he realised. He set the mug down and went back into the room. He knew he should leave Vladimir’s body untouched but, all the same, he closed his eyelids with a fingertip, pushed his mouth shut and straightened him out, positioning him supine on the mattress with his arms by his side. Now he looked as if he were sleeping — sort of. The complete and total inertness was the give-away: the absence of even the tiniest movement, the chest rising and falling, nostrils flaring, the little physical tics of vivacity we all produce unreflectingly, inadvertently, that show we are alive.
Adam supposed that Vladimir must have monkey-smoked his way to a massive cardio-vascular trauma: his weak heart succumbing to an attack brought on, perhaps, by one hit of the pipe too many, one final, dizzying, drug-buzzing, adrenalin surge that had overwhelmed him. The faulty heart valve that his kind, generous neighbours and fellow villagers had thought they had paid to have replaced, now fatally malfunctioning. And so Vladimir in his beatific drug-stupor had passed on. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad way to go, Adam thought, as he covered him with a blanket and went out for a long reflective walk.
♦
It should have felt stranger living in a flat with a dead friend lying in the next-door room, Adam considered, but once Vladimir had been ‘laid out’, discreetly covered and the door firmly closed, Adam found that hours could pass without him once thinking about the corpse in the bedroom.
He had decided not to do anything hurriedly or rashly — just wait and think, plot and plan, take his time — in order to see if he could come up with a course of action that would allow Vladimir’s body to be properly removed and buried and, at the same time, not draw anyone’s attention to the fact that he, Adam Kindred, on the run and wanted for murder, had been staying in the flat. Not easy. He thought all through Sunday and the only notion he developed was that of simply walking away and later making an anonymous telephone call to the authorities. Vladimir knew none of his neighbours in Oystergate Buildings, not even in the two flats on either side of his — he hadn’t been there long enough, so no one would miss him or come unexpectedly calling. Adam himself reckoned that ‘community spirit’ in Oystergate Buildings was on the low side, anyway, not to say moribund. Sunday passed by, slowly. Adam walked the streets of Stepney, went to the cinema and saw a bad film, bought a pizza and took it back to the flat where he ate it while watching television.
On Monday morning, having come up with no new bright ideas, he decided to leave and packed up his few possessions again in their plastic bags. He wondered where he should go: he was tempted to return to the familiar security of the triangle by Chelsea Bridge but was immediately aware that however familiar the place was, its security was no longer on offer: the police had raided it; the ugly man from Grafton Lodge mews knew about it. No, he would simply have to find somewhere similarly secure — there must be somewhere else in London where he could hide up.
He shut the front door behind him — thinking: maybe Hampstead Heath? Wide open spaces — and had just turned the key in the lock when a postman in shorts, heavy boots and a dusty blue turban stamped wearily up the stairs.