‘I’ve got a surprise for you. Today, you’re going to leg a bomb in Trafalgar Square. This is the big stuff, right? Get Lord Nelson flat on his back and fry those lions. All you do is stick some jelly on the column and you’re laughing. What do you say?’
Murf said, ‘He’s garrity.’
‘Shut up, bat-face and get your clocks out.’
‘Leave him alone,’ said Brodie, glowering at Hood.
‘It’s your big day, sweetheart. Better than Euston — and this is only the beginning.’
‘Don’t pay no attention to him,’ said Brodie. She shuffled the cards, hit the pack on her knee, and flapping her elbows let the sheet fall from her breasts. They were small and very white behind the russet discs of her childish nipples. She scratched lazily at one with her thumb and said, ‘He’s crazy.’
Hood stayed in the doorway, watching Brodie cut the cards again. ‘If you think blowing up Nelson’s column is crazy why did you put the bomb in Euston?’
‘Maybe they wanted me to. Ever think of that?’
‘Deal them bitches,’ said Murf impatiently.
‘But you had a reason, right?’
‘Yeah. These rich people — they’re messing the other ones about, and like the other ones don’t have anything. I don’t know. It’s all politics and shit.’
‘It’s aggro,’ said Murf. ‘The rich ones don’t want to know.’
‘What if you were rich?’
Brodie laughed and cupped her breasts and squeezed them. ‘Heavy!’
But Murf lowered his head and spoke seriously, muffling his words by jerking his mouth to the side. ‘Well, I wouldn’t be rich like that, for one thing,’ he said. ‘They didn’t earn the money, did they? I mean, someone gave it to them. Their fathers or uncles like.’
Fing, favvers, unkoos; the boy nodded, putting his ears in shadow. Hood said, ‘But what if someone gave it to you?’
‘I never thought of it. Maybe buy myself a boat — one of these cabin cruisers. Or a car. Maybe a stereo. Shit like that.’ He grinned. ‘Maybe start meself a army.’
‘Stop hassling him,’ said Brodie, who was both severe and defensive. She was quicker than Murf and seemed to sense he was being mocked. ‘What do you want him to say?’
‘Keep your shirt on, sister,’ said Hood. ‘I was just wondering what I’m doing here, so I thought I’d ask you two.’
‘I like it here,’ said Murf.
‘We don’t get hassled, except by you,’ said Brodie, still sucking the toffee.
‘Okay, let’s be friends,’ said Hood, touching her shoulders.
‘I think he wants to raise you,’ said Murf.
‘Watch it, sonny, or I’ll kick you through that window, ears and all.’
In a low voice, Murf said, ‘Deal them cards.’
‘This is for you.’ Hood handed Brodie the envelope and told her what Mayo had said, making her repeat the instructions. Murf took the cards from Brodie’s lap and dealt them. Once, Hood had seen the boy play solitaire, shuffling and cutting the pack carefully, and arranging the cards on the table; and he had noticed how, muttering his tuneless chant, boom widdy-widdy, he had paused, wet his thumb and cheated.
‘We’ll need fares,’ said Brodie.
‘You’ve got money.’
‘Spent it.’ She sucked the toffee, held it in her teeth and opened her mouth for Hood to see, making a face.
‘Here.’ Hood gave her a pound.
‘It ain’t enough.’
‘It’s plenty.’
‘A quid and all,’ said Murf, still dealing the cards. ‘Maybe buy meself a boat with that.’
Before they went out they dressed themselves in Indian shirts, long muslim smocks with flowers embroidered on them — Brodie’s was sleeveless and showed her tattoo. They wore wristlets, strings of amber blobs and dungarees that had been patched and sewn with badges and army insignia; they carried shoulder-bags they had bought at a jumble sale in Deptford. These flapping costumes made Hood think not of gypsies but of children dressed up as gypsies, amateur players slouching down Albacore Crescent and past the pillar box to some trivial farce. Their costumes revealed more of what was childish in them than their nakedness had. Play-actors — but they could not be blamed: they did what they were told. They disappeared at the end of the road, near the melancholy sight of a man in blue overalls brushing up a circus poster.
Hood had known what to do — the thought had been with him all week — but his certainty made him delay. Certitude unmarked by doubt was suspect, a trap, and he had been proved wrong too recently not to pause. He had been so sure of the dark flaws in the Rogier self-portrait, and then beneath the caked varnish and all the dusty black he had seen the pinpricks of swallowing light, the change in the man’s expression, the riot at the window. And Weech: he had obeyed that impulse without a single doubt. Now he wondered if he had made a mistake. He hadn’t counted on the wife and child: he owed that family something.
Mayo was certain, but Mayo’s movements were brisk with evasion. Hood had always visualized the business of plotting as something which went on all day and late into the night — the poring over plans, the scenarios of assault and siege, the meetings, gaining a controlling advantage by stealth. The exercise of secret crafts. But where was the craft? Mayo watched television when she was in the house, and though she spent some afternoons away from Deptford, when Hood asked her where she had been, she’d say ‘Shopping’ and prove it with a bag of groceries. She never had visitors; he had seen no-one at the house but her and the two children, marriage’s parody enacted in a Deptford hideout that had become a family home. So he was kept at the edge of action, captive in the kind of solitude that can madden. He had come so far for that, and the inaction worked on him, it roused him, lit his imagination — he was made furious by the continual stalling.
He put Weech’s wallet, the money and the bunch of keys in the pocket of his black raincoat. He had given the widow time to leave, but he would be quick — get inside and leave the stuff, then split; he wouldn’t snoop. Already what he knew of the woman depressed him: he didn’t want to know any more. He went to the house, slid the key in the lock and eased the door open.
The house was unusually cold, holding a chill on its walls that muted the sounds of his entering. His face tightened in the morgue-like air, as if the whole place was made of stone slabs that were masked by the arsenic-coloured wallpaper. He waited in the damp passage and listened before proceeding further into the closed clammy rooms, noticing the toys, the telephone directories heaped by the phone. The rooms were neat, bare, anonymous: a sitting room, a dining room — a few pieces of new furniture, a table, a television, a shelf of china figures. A plastic clock filled the tiny kitchen with its ticking. He would leave the money there, weight it with the wallet and keys, and go; but he paused and looked again in the sitting room and began to prowl.
On the upstairs landing there was a twisted slipper, and further on a throttled cloth animal. He tried the doors: a toilet, a bedroom with a white wardrobe and a mirror reflecting a counter of jars and bottles; then a child’s room with an unmade cot and a clutter of toys and torn comics. The frail claim of habitation in the layer of cheap objects. But there were two more rooms. They were locked, and Hood fished out Weech’s bunch of keys and opened the first room. It was filled. Light filtering through the drawn net curtains fell on a great heap of merchandise, a solid wall of brown cartons, a row of new televisions — some still padded in bars of plastic foam; and among these were small objects, radios, record-players, hair-dryers shaped like pistols, and hubcaps, automobile chrome, sink fittings, cameras. He read the cartons: they were cases of cigarettes, tobacco, whisky, perfume, and the boxes lent to the stale air of the room a cardboard aroma of newness. The floor was so littered with goods there was no room for Hood to walk.