‘Get your stuff packed up,’ he said. ‘You’re moving out.’
The girl with the green hair started screaming at him, but he had learned, during his years as a bouncer, to turn the volume down on other people’s noise. He was only aware of a girl with her mouth open, her throat and forehead reddening, the veins pushing against the thin skin of her neck. Her hands were clenched at hip-level, the inside of her wrists turned towards him. She wasn’t holding a weapon. He walked past her, into the kitchen. Opened the fridge. Yoghurt, orange juice, half a tin of baked beans. He picked up a carton of milk and sniffed at it. Seemed fresh enough.
‘Whose side are you on?’ said the girl in the T-shirt.
Barker looked at her. ‘I used to listen to Bob Marley.’ He thought back to the early seventies. ‘“Crazy Baldheads”,’ he said, and laughed. He drained the carton of milk, crushed it and dropped it on the floor. Then glanced at his watch. Ten-forty-nine. ‘I’m going to be generous,’ he said. ‘I’m going to give you twenty minutes.’
Two faces stared at him blankly from the kitchen doorway. The girl with the green hair was probably still screaming in the corridor. He cleared his throat. His mouth tasted sour. Squatters’ milk.
‘You hear what I said? Twenty minutes.’
He opened the door to the small roof terrace and walked outside. A bleak day, mist softening the shapes of the trees. Not a bad view, though. His view now. Maybe he could buy one of those barbecue contraptions with spindly legs, the ones that look like spaceships. He could invite Charlton round for hamburgers. On summer evenings he could sit here with a cold beer, his feet propped on the railings, and look out over the backs of houses, the rows of narrow gardens. Standing with his hands in the pockets of his jacket and his feet apart, Barker began to sing ‘Hotel California’ under his breath. He had no idea why that particular song had come to mind — unless perhaps he’d heard it on the radio that morning while he was waiting for his saucepan of water to boil.
On a dark desert highway
Cool wind in your hair …
He had to hum the rest because he couldn’t remember the words. When he walked back inside, the squatters were huddled by the front door, their possessions crammed into two black bin-liners. Who would have thought it would be so easy? Charlton had offered him the use of a Rottweiler that morning, but he’d said no, and all the way over he’d been regretting it. Because he’d had no idea of what he might be up against.
He followed the squatters down the stairs, the words of the song coming back to him. Last thing I remember …
From the doorstep he watched them drift disconsolately away, three figures dissolving into the mist at the end of the street. It seemed unlikely they’d be back.
Upstairs again, on the third floor, he began to look around. In the two main rooms, the bedroom and the lounge, they’d left a lot of rubbish behind — silver take-away cartons, dirty clothing, cigarette butts, empty bottles. The ceiling in the kitchen looked as if it leaked, and the toilet wouldn’t flush at all. Otherwise, the flat was in reasonable condition. He took out the mobile Charlton had given him and dialled Charlton’s number. Standing in the middle of the room with the phone pressed to his ear, he had a flash of what it must be like to be Ray Peacock.
‘It’s me,’ he said when Charlton answered.
‘How did it go?’
‘All right.’ Barker moved to the window, the floorboards wincing under his weight. He peered up into the sky. Grey. All grey.
‘Any problems?’ Charlton said.
‘You might need a couple of new doors.’
Charlton laughed for longer than was necessary. Relief could do that to people. So could fear. Barker held the phone away from his ear and thought he could see Charlton’s laughter bubbling out of the tiny holes. Then, suddenly, a plane went over and it seemed as though everything he could hear had just been buried in an avalanche.
The quality Barker appreciated most in Harold Higgs was the fact that he didn’t talk more than he needed to. It could have been the direct result of his speech impediment — a kind of self-consciousness, a deliberate attempt to limit the amount of embarrassment he caused — but somehow Barker doubted it; the barber’s sparing use of words seemed in character, along with his neatness and his punctuality. One morning, though, as clouds lowered over the rooftops and rain slanted across the window of the shop, Higgs started telling Barker about his years in the Air Force. He had served as a navigator in Lancaster bombers, he said. He had flown over Germany, more than twenty missions. His stammer, that was when it started.
Although he was interested, Barker didn’t understand why Higgs had suddenly decided to talk to him, and it was another half an hour before it became clear. That morning, as he walked to work, Higgs had been attacked by three white youths, and he was feeling furious and bitter and disappointed. After all, he said, and Barker could sense that he found it distasteful having to resort to a cliché, he’d probably done more for the country than they’d ever done, and yet, there they were, telling him that he was useless.
‘You’re not hurt?’ Barker said.
Higgs shook his head. ‘No.’
‘My father was in the Navy,’ Barker said. ‘Destroyers.’
He told Higgs a story his father had often told him when he was young. One night in 1942 — this was during the time of the convoys — Frank Dodds had been swept overboard by a freak wave. Only one man noticed, and that man had managed to raise the alarm. Frank Dodds survived.
‘It was December in the North Atlantic,’ Barker said. ‘You didn’t last long in that water.’
Higgs watched him from a chair by the window. Though it was dark in the shop, neither of the two men had bothered to turn the lights on. From outside, the place probably looked closed.
‘I’m going to tell you something,’ Barker said, surprising himself a little with the announcement, ‘something I don’t tell many people. It’s about my name.’
‘I w-wondered about that.’
‘But you never said anything. Some people, they think they’re clever. They like to crack jokes.’
Higgs shrugged, as if jokes held little interest for him.
‘I was lucky,’ Barker said. ‘I could have been called Jocelyn.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s what my father always said whenever I gave him a hard time about my name. My two brothers, they’ve got ordinary names, but I was the oldest, I was named after the man who saved my father, the man who saw him fall into the water. Jocelyn Barker.’
Higgs scratched his white hair with one long finger. ‘I think your father m-made the right decision.’
Barker laughed at that, and Higgs laughed with him, and the rain fell steadily outside, a constant murmur under their conversation.
‘He was a hairdresser,’ Barker mentioned later.
‘Your father was a hairdresser?’
‘That’s how I learned.’
Higgs smiled to himself, as if Barker was only confirming something that he had known all along, or guessed, and then the bell above the door jangled and a man in a grey raincoat walked in, cursing the bloody weather and shaking the water off his clothes.
The days passed evenly, without excitement, without disaster. Barker would leave his flat at eight-thirty every morning, returning at six o’clock at night. Though he now lived further from the shop, he chose to walk to work. It took half an hour, but he felt it did him good. And besides, he had grown fond of the streets; he liked the way their names gave you clues as to their history, the fact that you could turn a corner and smell rope or cinnamon or tea. Most days, he crossed the river at the Tower. He noticed how the buildings seemed to crouch and huddle to the east of Tower Bridge, and how the sky seemed to widen, to expand. There was the sudden feeling of being close to an estuary, a foretaste of the sea. The sight of HMS Belfast moored against the south bank never failed to remind him of his father. He thought Frank Dodds would probably have stopped and leaned on the bridge and stared down at the battleship with a look of approval on his face; he would have told Barker what size shells the big guns fired, how many men were in the crew.