Steve unpacked a tin of Spam.
‘What?’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Steve.’
The old man poured tea into the two mugs.
‘Ernest Matthews,’ he said. ‘How do you like it?’
Steve looked round the room. On the wall opposite stood an enormous sideboard in whose nooks and crannies were lodged shirtstuds, a leadless pencil, stamp edging, several keys, a large seashell, a stuffed weasel, overflowing ashtrays, a magnifying glass, a selection of dried-up fountain pens, buttons, endless scraps of paper, drawing pins, pipecleaners, a cut-throat razor, empty jam jars, coins, pieces of bone, and half a hundred things whose name and purpose, if they had either, Steve did not know. Every single object was covered, as if by protective cotton wool, in a thick even layer of dust. The corner opposite the door was occupied by a bed consisting of a metal frame with a wire mesh to support the mattress. The blankets were thrown back to reveal unclean wrinkled sheets. The pillow still bore the imprint of a sleeping head.
Ernest Matthews glanced at him.
‘Eh? Speak up, lad!’ he said sharply. ‘My ears aren’t what they were. How do you like it?’
‘It’s all right.’
He hoped that this, high praise to the stotters, would do.
‘What’s all right?’ the old man asked with a bemused expression.
Steve shrugged.
‘Everything.’
‘Well I’m very pleased to hear it, I’m sure!’ the old man snapped. ‘However, I wasn’t asking about everything, I was asking about the tea. How do you like it? Weak? Strong? With or without? Just a dash? One lump or two?’
After a pause, Steve said he didn’t know.
‘Don’t know!’ Matthews exclaimed, with a laugh that sounded like a crumpled sheet of plastic film unwrapping itself. ‘Well, bless my soul, I’d never thought I’d live to hear a British lad say such a thing.’
He added milk and sugar to both mugs.
‘You are British, I take it?’
‘I can’t stay long,’ Steve replied.
‘Mum and Dad expecting you back, are they? Time for a cup of tea, though. Was there any change from that tenner, by the by?’
Steve laid a handful of coins on the oilcloth. The old man separated fifty pence from the rest.
‘That’s for you. Have a cake and drink your tea before it stews.’
Matthews took a mug of tea and walked over to the armchair by the stove. When he was settled, he unrolled a tobacco pouch of waxed cloth and started to fill a pipe which he dug out of the creases of the chair.
‘You’re dripping all over the lino,’ he remarked to Steve. ‘Haven’t you got a proper coat? You’ll catch your death, you mark my words.’
Steve sat down on one of the straight-backed dining chairs drawn up to the table and started to sip his tea. Meanwhile the old man took a large brass lighter from another crevice of the armchair and produced a flame of impressive dimensions with which he proceeded to scorch the uppermost layer of tobacco in his pipe.
‘Hot in here,’ Steve ventured, to break the silence.
Ernest Matthews nodded.
‘And do you know the beauty of it? They don’t have to come in the house. There’s a coal-hole round the side, drops straight down into a bunker next door to the scullery.’
He turned his attention to his pipe again. Between puffs the smoke rose from the bowl in an enigmatic curl, like a lock of hair. Steve took one of the cakes out of the box and carefully peeled away its silver case, which was pleated like an old lady’s skirt. Matthews opened a door in the stove and prodded the glowing coals with a brass-handled poker.
‘The milkman does eggs and bread and potatoes and butter and cheese,’ he went on, ‘but everything else I’ve had to do without. My legs are not what they were, you see. Fifty pence a week and tea thrown in, with a cake or some biscuits, whatever’s going. What do you say?’
Steve gulped down the rest of his tea and picked the crumbs of the cake off the table with a moistened forefinger.
‘I got to be going,’ he said, standing up.
The way back along the basement passage, up the stairs and along the corridor seemed much shorter. Almost too soon, Steve found himself back in the chilly hallway. Before opening the front door, Matthews knelt down, lifted the flap of the letter-box and looked out for a long time.
‘Can’t be too careful,’ he remarked. ‘Times being what they are.’
Outside it was really cold. Steve told the old man he’d see him the following week and then ran off quickly. His thoughts, as he walked back to Trencham Road, were about money. The change which he had been told to keep the previous week had come to only a few pence in the end, and Steve had spent it on sweets, which he’d eaten on the way home. But if the old man was going to give him fifty pence every week that posed a problem. There was nowhere he could hide the money that the stotters might not look, nothing he could spend it on that they would not see. He didn’t even want to think about what they might do if they found out that he’d been cheating them. The fate of his predecessors on the delivery round had been widely reported in the local media. One of the pensioners had sustained a dislocated hip, the other several fractured ribs. Dave admitted that once he got going he found it hard to stop. So the only course open to Steve really was to hand over the extra money, but it was going to be hard to explain this unexpected 25 per cent increase in the money he got for doing the paper round. He was still trying to think up a suitable story when he came to the main road he had to cross to get home. The traffic was heavy, as usual at this hour. It was while he was standing there, looking for an opening and worrying about what he was going to tell the stotters, that the grinning man appeared for the second time, bearing down on Steve like a demented soldier marching to destruction.
‘Hey!’ he called, his expression mocking and exultant. ‘Hey, do you know what time it is?’
As he spoke, the vicious pent-up laughter that glittered in his eyes and twisted the muscles of his sweating face to breaking-point burst out, mutilating the words almost beyond recognition. He stood there, jerking and twitching all over, staring at the boy with such intensity it seemed he might be about to explode. Steve shook his head. The man’s face screwed itself into a fierce grimace of contemptuous hostility, as if the boy was only pretending not to know, just to spite him. The sarcastic grin became bitterer than ever. ‘What’s the point in keeping up this pathetic farce?’ it seemed to say. ‘You don’t think you fool me, do you?’ A gap opened in the traffic and Steve took off, just beating a van that appeared out of nowhere. By the time he reached the other side and looked back, the man had gone.
Jimmy, Dave, Alex and Tracy were watching TV, the floor around them littered with cans of lager and take-out trays of chips with curry sauce. While he was wondering how they’d been able to pay for these luxuries, Steve realized that he hadn’t come up with a story to explain the extra money. To his surprise however, Jimmy — usually stingily suspicious where money was concerned — didn’t even bother to count the coins Steve gave him.
‘What’s this?’ he jeered. ‘You rob someone?’
For some reason this comment made Dave laugh, which effectively put an end to everything else for a while. Dave was not easily amused, but on the occasions when he did indulge he went all the way, whooping and yelping and howling, clutching his gut, drumming his heels on the floor and banging his forehead against the wall. But they were all in form that night, the stotters, for although the old woman Jimmy had selected as their target had been carrying less than he’d hoped, the hit itself had been a complete success and the take was still enough to pay for this modest celebration. The idea of using Tracy as bait had been fucking brill, if Jimmy did say so himself. People were always more trustful of girls, whatever they looked like. With attention focused on her, Dave was able to move in and get to work without any bother, while Alex and Jimmy kept look-out. No sweat! Jimmy couldn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t regularly supplement their income in the same way. Sooner or later they were bound to pick on someone who was carrying serious money, like that first time or even better. Then Jimmy would be off so fast these wankers wouldn’t see him for dust. In keeping with the stotters’ general policy towards the boy, Steve was kept out of this. All he knew was that everyone was in a good mood, that everything seemed to be going right. When Tracy passed out with one leg resting against his, warming him with a gentle radiance that penetrated his damp jeans like sunlight, the boy’s happiness was complete.