Only Charlton knew where Barker could be found. On spring evenings, just after sunset, Barker would often hear the silver Sierra pull up in the street below. Charlton would take him to Brick Lane where they would eat meat curry and drink beer out of stainless-steel beakers. Or sometimes they would drive to a pub in Bethnal Green. Otherwise, Barker lived on baked potatoes, toast and Hofmeister lager, which was cheap that year. Though he had bought paint wholesale from an ironmonger’s down the road and though he had almost no furniture — he kept his clothes in a filing-cabinet he’d found in a skip and slept on a bed Charlton had lent him — it had still cost him money to turn the flat into a place that was fit to live in, and there were times when he didn’t know how he was going to get by. Only thirty-five pounds remained of the eight hundred he’d arrived with, and he knew Higgs couldn’t afford to pay him any more than he was already paying. In general, Barker could look on his life with a certain satisfaction. It didn’t amount to much, of course, not by other people’s standards, but at least nobody was pushing lit cigarettes through his letter-box in the middle of the night.
Still, sometimes he felt strange, lying on a borrowed mattress in an empty building, thirty-eight years old. He had dismantled one life, and he had yet to construct another in its place. He did what he could with his limited resources. He knew it was temporary, though, a kind of quarantine, and there was a sense in which he was waiting for the health of his new existence to be recognised, but he couldn’t imagine how exactly that might happen, or when.
Not long after Barker moved in, a man appeared at his front door. The man was in his middle to late fifties and he wore a dark-green anorak and a scarf. He seemed anxious and ill-at-ease, constantly glancing over his left shoulder, as if he was expecting an ambush.
‘I’m looking for Will Campbell.’
Barker remembered the two girls, and the boy who’d stood behind them, not saying anything, a skinny white kid with dreadlocks and a ragged sweater.
‘There’s only me here,’ he said.
The man passed one hand over his forehead and up into his thinning hair. ‘Someone gave me this address.’ He studied the scrap of paper he was holding, then looked up at the building. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘this is the address.’
‘He must have moved.’
‘Oh.’ The man stood on the pavement, unsure what he should do but, at the same time, unwilling to leave. He had reached a dead end and if he left he would be forced to admit that to himself. While he stayed outside the building that matched the address he had been given, he could still feel that he stood on solid ground, that there was hope. ‘You don’t know where he went?’
‘No idea.’
‘I rang up, you see. About a month ago. I was told the phone had been disconnected. So I thought I’d come down …’
‘I live here now.’
‘Yes.’
‘Nothing I can do. Sorry.’
‘He’s my son.’ Spaces seemed to open in the man’s face, between his features.
Arms folded, Barker leaned against the door-frame. He was into overtime with this conversation, and yet he didn’t want to be more brutal than he had to be.
‘He was squatting here,’ the man said suddenly. ‘I didn’t approve, of course.’ He was staring at the pavement, frowning. ‘He had a girlfriend. Vicky …’ He looked at Barker hopefully. Barker shook his head.
After the man had gone, Barker stood in his bedroom and stared out of the window. Rain fell lazily through the lamplight. He could still see Will Campbell, the way he had lurched up the street, a black bin-liner in one hand, the other clamped over a ghetto-blaster, which balanced, like a pet monkey, on his shoulder. He remembered how Will Campbell had thrown him a couple of V-signs — but only when a good distance had opened up between them, only when it was too late to make any difference. Shaking his head again, Barker walked into the lounge and sat down on a swivel chair he had taken from the old printer’s studio in the basement. In his mind he returned to Plymouth. Nineteen-eighty, eighty-one. Years after his marriage fell apart. One afternoon he happened to pass through Morice Town, which was where Leslie had grown up, and he suddenly remembered being told that she’d moved back into the area. He asked around on the estates. Eventually he found someone who had heard of her, who knew where she was living. A ground-floor flat in a drab four-storey block. He knocked on the door. His throat felt thick, and he could hardly swallow. What was he doing there? What did he want? Perhaps it was simply that no woman had replaced her in his life and sometimes, when he lay awake at night, he thought of how she used to dance for him, in that two-room flat she had in Devonport, in her red underwear.
Her mother, Diane, opened the door. Diane had dyed her hair a dark cherry colour, and she wore a big pink T-shirt over a pair of black leggings. Somewhere behind her, inside the flat, Barker heard a baby crying.
‘How are you, love? Give us a kiss.’
He leaned down, kissed her cheek. She smelled of deodorant and cigarettes. She had always been fond of him, Diane. She said he reminded her of her youngest brother, who had died in a car crash when he was seventeen. He stood outside her front door in the sunshine, answering her questions. It was a beautiful day — a blue sky and a fresh wind blowing from the west, the clothes on the communal washing-lines below them horizontal in the air.
While they were talking, he noticed a pigeon moving awkwardly along a low brick wall. It was huge, this pigeon, almost the size of a pheasant, and it only had one leg. When he pointed it out to Diane, she slit her eyes against the sun and lit another cigarette.
‘Christ,’ she said. ‘Seen it all now.’
They watched the pigeon in silence until it spread its wings and heaved itself into the air. Barker remembered being surprised that it could fly.
‘I suppose you’re looking for Leslie,’ Diane said eventually.
He nodded.
‘She’s down the pub. With Chris.’
‘Chris?’
‘Well,’ Diane said and then she sighed, ‘you know Leslie.’
He walked to the pub, which stood on the crest of a small hill not far from Dockyard Station. With one hand on the door, though, he hesitated, thinking it would probably be a mistake to go inside. As he stepped back, passing the window, he saw Leslie through the glass, her back half-turned, her feet in a square of sunlight. She had a Human League haircut, which must have been the fashion then, and she was wearing a skirt that was too young for her. A man with shoulder-length black hair stood next to her. In his jeans and faded blue tartan shirt, he had the look of a builder. Chris. They were in the middle of an argument. Barker couldn’t make out what Leslie was saying, even though her voice was the louder of the two. He thought he heard the words two hundred quid and bastard. Turning away, he walked down the hill to Saltash Road and caught a bus back to the city centre. He could remember nothing else about that day.
When Barker left his flat in the early evening, he half-expected to see Will Campbell’s father waiting outside the old warehouse, under the hoists, or on the corner by the corrugated-iron fence, but there was no sign of him. The rain had stopped. To the west, above the public gardens, a wall of cloud lifted high into the sky, glowing with an unearthly peach-coloured light. In medieval times, he thought, this would have heralded some terrible event — the murder of a king, for instance, or an outbreak of the plague. Death of one kind or another. He paused at the end of the street, wondering if the man in the dark-green anorak believed in omens. Then he turned left, making for the nearest phone-box, which was on Tooley Street.