At the end of the short passage behind the shop I stepped into a semi-dark dusty room. There was some machine cranking away in the far corner that was responsible for the squealing and drumming I had heard. Straight ahead of me was another doorway which led to an uncarpeted staircase and to the back door. Through the glass in this I could see that evening was coming on. The sky was turning red. The machine drummed on. I realised there was a familiar smell that reminded me of some place but I couldn’t think where. I had started to sweat. I could still hear the record playing from the shop — even though the machine’s drumming noise was getting louder — as if someone had turned up the volume. A shadow extended down the old wooden stairs. I retreated into the shadows of the room, imagining angry shopkeepers coming at me from both directions. After all, I was trespassing. The shadow lengthened on the stairs and I took another step back and bumped into the pounding, shrieking machine. I caught my hand in something and felt a sudden sharp pain. I looked at my hand. The end of the short third finger of my left hand was burnt black and the pain quickly receded as the finger went numb.
Then I realised what the smell was — I remembered the toilet cubicle on the train and the dog that smashed its head through the window. I spun around and saw my ‘machine’ clearly for the first time. It was a large running wheel constructed out of two bicycle wheels spinning on an axis. The diameter of the wheel was increased by wooden extensions and the perimeters were two four-foot-wide hoops of beaten metal. Wooden slats were affixed between the two metal hoops, creating a wheel which spun around the central axis.
Running inside the wheel was a dark mottled pit bull terrier, its eyes flashing, ropes of saliva flying from its hanging jaw. It was staring at me as it ran, its nailed feet hammering on the wooden slats. The bicycle wheels squealed. The dog ran. I couldn’t move.
Someone appeared in the doorway, having come down the stairs.
It was a girl in a dark, sliver-flecked skating dress.
‘This way,’ she hissed at me. ‘Quickly.’ She nodded towards the passage that led to the shop and even this close to the dog I could hear the dull booms and ghostly clicks of the endless ‘groove’ music.
I moved towards the girl, noticing that the hairs on my arms were standing on end and my legs felt weak. As I got closer I could see her long black hair shining in the yellowish light from the shop. Was she the girl from my dream? Or was she the skater I’d seen on the night I’d entered the City? I didn’t trust her. I didn’t trust my eyes. She wasn’t real. I darted back into the passage towards the shop.
I barged into the shop just as two figures entered from the street.
‘Fuck,’ I said as I took in their appearance and turned back to the passage. But already they were coming for me. Stooped, twisted, black-haired bodies but with unmistakably human features, they covered the distance between the door and the counter in a heartbeat. I slammed the passage door after me and raced for the back door, which the dark-haired girl was holding open for me. As I fled across the space of the back room I heard the dog, no longer running in its wheel, give a powerful tug on its chain leash. It could smell my fear and it wanted blood.
The two creatures smashed through the door behind me into the passage and I leapt for the open doorway beyond the old wooden staircase. The girl closed and locked it after me in a flurry of hand movements that seemed to melt into one action.
‘This way,’ she said and we took off down the back entry. I’m not saying she skated over the cobbles but she moved faster than the things behind us and somehow I was able to keep up with her. We ran for at least a mile and a half. ‘In here,’ she panted, pressing her weight against a solid-looking door at the back of what looked like an abandoned cinema. The door gave and I squeezed through after her.
‘My name’s Stella. You’re safe now,’ she said when she’d got her breath back. I was still bent double. ‘You know, if you’re going to stick around you’ll have to do something about your appearance.’
Stella moved away from me and I saw where we were. Not a cinema at all, but an ice rink. One or two bare bulbs burned, causing the expanse of ice to glow dully beyond the rows of seats. The girl slipped onto the ice. I couldn’t imagine how she’d had time to lace up her skating boots.
Chapter Ten
I sensed there was something wrong with my father even before I was told. As I sat on the stairs and watched him carefully thread the buckle of his trench coat and place his trilby on his head, tipping it slightly to one side in the hall mirror, I was aware of feeling vaguely anxious. Maybe it was the way he avoided his own eyes in the glass and just observed the angle of his hat. He would go through into the kitchen to say a quiet goodbye to my mother. I rarely heard what they said to each other at these times. Their voices were a low murmur. Then he would come back into the hall and shout up the stairs, ‘Ta-ra, Carl. Look after your mother.’ He didn’t know I’d been sitting watching him get ready so I would always creep away from the banisters before shouting back, ‘Bye’.
He’d open the front door and close it gently behind him and I would run to my room to watch him walk up the street. Always the same, he walked with a relaxed, confident step, nodding at the Hansons in the garden outside their prefab and turning to look behind before crossing the road. I always thought he might see me at that point, but his eyes remained on the road.
I sat in my room for a bit, picking up books and reading the first lines before putting them back, fingering my jam jar filled with half-completed fishing floats made out of pampas grass stems, which Jim, the window cleaner, pinched for me from the garden of the big house at the bottom of Heath Street. I couldn’t settle to anything. I turned my little clock radio on but it was always playing ‘If You Leave Me Now’ by Chicago, so I got up and mooched around the landing and stairs for a couple of minutes, then went downstairs and into the kitchen.
My mother was leaning over the work surface rolling out pastry. There was flour all over the lino around her feet. I looked at the pastry. She’d rolled it completely flat and it had split in a dozen places yet she carried on rolling like a faulty machine and the flour spotted the sleeves of her cardigan and caught in the long dark hair drawn across her face.
How old was I then? Twelve, thirteen? I reached across and took the rolling pin from her. She didn’t resist, just pressed her hands against the worktop for support and cried. I hugged her around the waist and felt her body shake. Eventually she turned enough to take me into her arms and we stayed that way for up to a minute. The edge of the worktop was pressing uncomfortably into my back, but, as my father had said, I had to look after my mother. Then I felt foolish because I realised I probably wasn’t helping much at all by allowing her to comfort me.
My mother pulled away and took a paper tissue from her cardigan sleeve. She dabbed at the corners of her eyes and blew her nose. There were little shiny paths running through the powder down her cheeks.
‘It’s Dad, isn’t it?’ I said and she started crying again. I’d seen my mother cry at films on the television but never like this. There had to be something terribly wrong with my father. I knew it couldn’t be money or work, or his parents dying, because they were both dead. It had to be his health. He was sick. But how sick?