‘They all crazy like that up in Catford,’ said the black man. Then he straightened his cap and reached for Mr Gawber’s ticket. ‘Thank you.’
Mr Gawber showed his season pass in the plastic wallet. He said, ‘Caught napping!’
‘Excess charge,’ said the black man. He plucked again at the fingerprints on his visor.
‘Kah,’ said the woman. She looked away and blew, recovering.
‘I’ve never been here before.’
The black man took out a pad, inserted a carbon, and with a complicated care that interested Mr Gawber, wrote figures on the thin top sheet. This paperwork seemed a suitable acknowledgement for the degree to which Mr Gawber felt off-course, and he said again, ‘I’ve never been here before.’
‘Five pence additional,’ said the man. ‘Pay the cashier.’
‘Kah,’ said the woman.
‘And that not all,’ said the man. ‘You know the George up Rushey Green?’
Mr Gawber smiled: he knew the George. He wanted to enter the conversation, to give a conclusion to this oddly-spent day, and hear the couple cluck: You mean you never been here before? He waited for the black man to see him waiting.
After a moment the black man turned to him and said, ‘But if you come here again, mister, get the right ticket.’
Mr Gawber said, ‘I’m looking for a call-box.’
‘Don’t have to take no train for that,’ said the man. He chopped the air with his hands. ‘Down the footpath. Pass the shed. On you left. The Motive. Can’t miss it.’
Mr Gawber paid his fare and found the path. The late-afternoon brightness cooked a smell of hot pollen from the cat mint, the cow parsley and the tall weighted weeds swayed in a thickness of foraging bees. The path narrowed, and soon Mr Gawber was alone in the greenery, his suit flecked with seeds. He could smell the oily dirt and brake dust from the train tracks, but he could not see above the tops of the stalks and grasses. He almost laughed; he was delighted by this sense of being lost so near his home. Norah, I’m somewhere in Lower Sydenham! The sun heated the insects and made them crackle under the dusty over-sized weeds which, left to grow here undisturbed, were exaggerations of the small pulpy ones in his garden. He saw tall saw-toothed things, spiky blossoms, dragon-tailed leaves, white-haired stalks, thistles and wild garlic: assertive castaways. And he was gladdened by them. It was the perfect end to a day which had from the first seemed unusuaclass="underline" freedom!
He had been jostled out of his routine and he wanted to know every detail of its difference. He poked at this place with his umbrella’s point. His life had been without surprises; he did not want surprises. But this was manageable and it cheered him. Past the shed and a terrace of eight houses with useless numbers and corrugated iron sheets nailed to their windows he saw the public house and its sign, The Locomotive. He entered, and breathing wood planks and sawdust and beer he went to the bar to celebrate his arrival instead of flying to the telephone to tell Norah he’d be late.
3
All the way to the bus stop on the hill the pursuer was hidden from the man he chased by mothers smiling at the sun and turning their bodies gently as they walked. Pursuit was an easy secret in this crowd of casual shoppers, the women bringing a waist-high tide of children forward. Hood rolled steadily behind them as they paused and gathered like hookers — offering smiles, soliciting nods, not going anywhere — and he kept his eye on the plum-coloured shoulder thirty feet ahead. He boarded the bus with him and followed him up the stairs to the top deck; the man dropped into a front seat, Hood fell into the seat at his back. The conductor appeared, bowing as the bus lurched, clutching the knobs of his ticket machine: ‘Thank you.’ The man asked for a five pence ticket; Hood did the same. The bus swayed through the traffic, its roof occasionally striking branches — the leaves wiping streaks on the side windows. Hood stared forward at the man’s head and found a dent in it, and just above the expensive collar saw the futile contour of cowardice in the furrow of the man’s neck.
Hood shredded his bus ticket, impatience jerking his fingers. He had never been on that bus or gone in that direction, south in South London; so it seemed to him, on the move again, as if he was continuing the journey he had so abruptly started in Vietnam months before. This was part of that same world. He forgot Mayo and her painting, Murf and his ear-ring, tattooed Brodie. He longed to act; to abandon this chase would be an evasion of his strength. He craved the kind of blame that would release him honourably from the charge of inaction, a guilt-like grace. There was only one way: to frighten the bully and prove to himself not his own strength but that weeping boy’s. An accident had brought him here; but there were no accidents — instinct was offered expression by a hollowing of chance, and impulse seized it. You didn’t choose, you were chosen, claimed by an impulse that knew more than wisdom did of pain. That was justification enough: there was no law before passion’s anger. A year ago a man had said, These people are not worth it, and Hood had gone quite close to him and punched his face. Within an hour Hood had been suspended by the ambassador and ordered to Washington: he had punched a government minister. The act had freed him, and what looked in Hood to have been savagery, a casual reckoning of penalties, was extreme disobedience. He had launched himself blindly and doing so was granted the gift of sight. He had always, even as a consul, acted with simple energy and then, examining his work, seen how the pattern had been fixed for him. So it had been since he had arrived in London: Mayo’s plan at Ward’s Irish House, the room in Deptford, the snoring children; those sweepers, that drunk, this bus: he belonged here since he could not deny that boy his strength.
The bus continued to wheeze, leaning the upper deck at lamps and pub signs and parlour curtains as it rounded bends, and flinging a bridge’s shadow down the aisle. All this was new — the long rows of terraces breaking into segments of eight and four, then further down Brockley Rise clusters of two, pebbledash semis with brick and timber cowls, name-boards on the gate and roses set in rectangles of lawn. Down there on the pavement a running child, and twenty yards later a solitary sprinter, the one he chased. Hood glanced to the right as the bus stopped, and saw at the end of a rising road a wooded hill and a biscuit-brown church lying in a declivity of the slope, nearly hidden by the trees. The hill rose above the housetops; Hood studied the foliage which, at this distance, had the density of a box hedge. It was unexpected in the closely mapped city to see a place that looked nameless, but he knew from his own neighbourhood, near the tail of the Deptford Creek, how an ordinary street would close in and stop and show a fence; and beyond that was another district, all corners overgrown and broken glass and discarded motor gaskets and bushes spilling into the blocked street. The area, no more than a white trapezoid on a map, a blankness that might have been labelled Unexplored or Here Live Savages, was sealed from view in the huge exposed city, as neatly hidden as if it was an island that lay under the sea, the ultimate hiding place. He marked the hill on his memory.
The terraces had begun again, tinier now, their front doors directly on the street. They slid back and gave onto a row of shops — fruiterer, chemist, newsagent, butcher, off-licence, pub — then resumed, to be interrupted further on by a similar parade of shops. They were far now from Deptford, and Hood wanted the man to get off the bus. He thought: If you know what’s good for you, go. The time passed and Hood felt the consequences worsen, for with each mile the urgency he was rehearsing moved by degrees he could compute, from simple assault, to grievous bodily harm, to maiming. The man was leading him to that, delaying an incidental fight by an interval of waiting which made Hood only more angry.