‘That safe house wasn’t safe,’ Giff said.
‘No shit.’
‘It was safe a week ago. They’re tightening up.’
I just sat there and waited, resigned, wondering who ‘they’ were and whose side Giff and Wolf were really on.
We pulled up outside a large heavy tenement block with external spidery fire escapes and very few windows that were still intact.
‘Take him in,’ Giff said to Wolf. ‘I’ll park round the back. And,’ he placed his left hand on the other man’s forearm, ‘be gentle. We’re supposed to be looking after him.’
I wished someone would address me instead of just speaking about me but Wolf was already tugging at my arm.
‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘I can manage.’ I got out of the car and allowed the staring man to lead me into the tenement building. He glanced about nervously. I shivered as I smelt animals.
‘What is it?’
It was the first time I’d heard him speak and it was a shock. He spoke with a quiet, educated voice which belied the wild look in his eyes.
‘Animals,’ I said. ‘There are animals here.’
‘Only rats,’ he said. ‘No dogs. No problem. Let’s go.’
As we made our way up the creaking wooden stairs I heard Giff enter the building from the back and run to catch up with us.
‘Don’t,’ snapped Wolf as I gripped the banister rail. I let go and he demonstrated by kicking out one of the spindles. The rotten length of wood turned somersaults in the air as it fell down the stairwell and clattered among the rubbish piled up in the foyer. Giff had caught up with us.
‘Trying to bring the house down, are you?’ he snarled at Wolf, who looked wounded. ‘Let’s get him inside quickly.’ He meant me.
Wolf kicked open a door and there was a desperate flurry of activity inside. As we stepped into the room a man pointed a gun in our direction.
‘Put it away, Professor,’ Giff growled.
‘You should have warned me. There were clearly three of you and I was expecting two.’ The Professor was a tall, thin man with small rimless glasses that flashed as his head moved. As we went further inside I noticed the Professor staring at me like Wolf had done. He didn’t let up until I had sat down on a battered old sofa covered with an off-white sheet. The Professor turned to Giff and said, ‘Is this really him?’
Giff just grunted and the Professor lost his shyness, looking directly at me and asking, ‘Is it really you? Was it you?’
I shrugged. This game was beginning to annoy me. I was tired and disorientated. Whoever I was supposed to be I was not sure I wanted the attention.
‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘I need rest.’
The Professor nodded and Wolf looked at Giff, who wiped a hand over his head to remove his black woollen beanie. I kicked off my boots and swung my legs up on the sofa. No longer bothered about what I should and shouldn’t do, I really did need some sleep.
‘You’re safe here,’ I heard Giff saying in a low voice as I stretched out on the sofa and closed my eyes. ‘At least for a couple of days.’
I had no intention of sticking around that long and it was only as I was drifting off to sleep that I remembered the map in my back pocket. Too tired to reach for it, I spread it out in my head and sought to trace a circuitous route out of this dark place back to my car on the hard shoulder of the motorway.
As my conscious mind gradually closed down, however, the streets changed to those of my childhood: the interlocking rows of terraced houses around the corner from our street of semis, the back entries smelling of rotten fruit and old prams, the 16-year-old girls who walked along the street across the top of the entry with their short pleated skirts and bouncing red hair, the tiny sky-blue invalid carriages parked outside the prefabs near the railway line, the dogs that snatched free ad-filled newspapers out of my hand as I stuck them through letter boxes, our flame-haired window cleaner Jim and his sleepy wife in her half-undone dressing gown, the advancing shadow of the only neighbourhood boy who was bigger than me.
Stamford Jackson was an unusually fair-minded bully. Most adolescent terrorists would pick on the smallest kids around and make their lives miserable but Stamford Jackson chose me, the second tallest child in all those roads off Heath Street, perhaps because he worked out that if he established his dominance over a big kid it would prove just how powerful he was to everyone else. Maybe he could sense also that I was a pushover — literally: the first time he hit me I fell and bruised my ankle on the cobbles down one of the entries at the top of Heath Street.
The first time I saw Stamford Jackson was on my paper round. I was nearing the end, having done Jim’s house — and failed to spot his half-naked wife through the curtains — and Sally Darke’s. I’d seen Jim’s wife once when I’d happened to look in through their front window and she’d been bending down to pick something up and her dressing gown had fallen open. She hadn’t seen me but I had of course looked in their window every week after that and never seen her again. Sally Darke was a girl who’d been a couple of years above me at primary school and who had once said something vaguely encouraging to me like ‘Lanky bastard’. Occasionally I saw her going in or coming out of her house and she sometimes flicked Vs at me and skipped past. I knew that if I said anything to her it would ruin it and she’d never look at me again. If I didn’t speak to her I could maintain the fantasy of a perfect relationship.
I’d also done all the houses that had dogs — I knew them well — and I’d not had my hand bitten off. At the top of Heath Street there was a funny little road that had a cul-de-sac going off it and that’s where Stamford Jackson lived. I didn’t know this at the time though I had heard of him from the kids I used to hang around with. I was delivering to the houses in the cul-de-sac, running up and down the paths and banging the gates, and I came to a house that had its front door standing open. The hallway was spectacularly untidy and dirty and I stood and looked at it in amazement. I didn’t know how anyone could live in such filth. Half-empty tins of Dulux Non-Drip Gloss, upended coffee mugs, an ashtray with about two thousand cigarette ends in it, a pair of dark blue underpants with dirty white piping, a copy of the Sun open at page three and some obscenity scrawled across it in red ballpoint, a crushed box of Mr Kipling’s Bakewell Tarts and a Wilbur Smith paperback with the spine broken in several places. And this was just the hall.
What I didn’t know was that I was being watched from the front room bay window. A sharp rap on the glass made me jump. There was a grey-haired old man wearing a vest that swelled over his belt, and his son who towered over him.
‘What are you fucking looking at, you nosy cunt?’ the old man snapped.
‘Fuck off,’ the boy added.
‘Just delivering a paper,’ I said.
The old man came striding into the hall at full tilt. He grabbed the paper from the floor and threw it at me.
‘Take your fucking paper. We don’t want it, nancy boy. Fuck off.’ He was practically screaming at me. The huge boy, still standing in the bay window, was grinning. I turned and ran as far as the embankment to the new road that had turned this street into a cul-de-sac. I was shaking. I ran up the embankment and crossed the new road which, unfinished, was still a sea of mud, thinking that I would finish the papers later.
I hung around on the footbridge over the railway line for twenty minutes, watching the electric trains scuttling into the station, their pantographs sparking against the wires. I thought of my father saying there was no romance left in the railways since the end of the steam era. I didn’t agree but I understood why he said it: he missed the trains he’d watched in his youth, whereas these electrics and the diesels that pulled freight wagons through Skelton Junction and over Broadheath were all I’d ever known and I couldn’t imagine them ever changing. I tried to imagine standing on the bridge and being enveloped by a cloud of steam from a locomotive passing underneath.