Mrs Short swivelled like a tank's gun turret and looked at him. "The room, Mr Grout? You want me to do it, then?" "No," Steven said, backing off towards the next flight of stairs, but still facing Mrs Short and trying to smile without showing his teeth. "No, honestly," he said, "really, I'll dust my own room, really. Thank you, but, no, really."
Mrs Short was still shaking her head and shaking her limp duster when he finally got round the sheltering twist in the stairs; Steven wiped his damp forehead, turned and ran quickly up the rest of the steps, shivering and grimacing as he thought about Mrs Short.
In his room, he could relax. He sat by the" window after he'd washed his face and upper body at the small handbasin in one corner of his room. From the basin he had to negotiate four straights and three right-angled corners through his maze of books on the floor to get to the window, where he had a small chair and could look out into Packington Street.
He liked looking out the window (today he had it open; it was a nice day) and sometimes would spend entire Saturday or Sunday afternoons just sitting there watching the traffic and the people in the street, and a curious sort of peace would slowly take him over, like something hypnotic, like a trance; he would just sit there, not thinking or worrying or seething about anything, just sitting watching, mind blank and free of cares, and the cars would move and the people pass and talk, and for a little while, through that lack of thought, that temporary surrender of his own personality, he could start to feel part of this place, this city and people and species and society; feel like he imagined all the other, ordinary people, the people who were not him and were not there specifically to torment him, must feel all the time.
He dried himself with his small towel; it smelled a bit, but not offensively. Comforting, like his bed.
He looked over the maze-walls of books covering the floor of his room. The book-walls, which he tried to keep at roughly the same level, were up to mid-thigh level now, and he was worried that soon they would start to become unstable. Of course, if he wasn't going to be getting any money he wouldn't be able to buy any more paperbacks for a while, maybe not until he found another new job. But even so, it was depressing to think of the chaos which would result from the books becoming unstable through sheer height, and while there was one way round the problem (he was proud to have worked this out) by putting the books together like bricks in a wall instead of simply stacking them one on top of another, this would make it even more difficult to get at a book if he wanted to read it again.
He started to panic at the thought, and wound his way through the books to the door of the room. He locked it, and took his Sunday-best safety helmet down from the overloaded peg behind the door. He put the hat on, and felt better. He took a different route back to the chair by the window and sat down again. What would he do now? Go for a drink. That was what you did when you left work, or when you had lots of money. He took the money out. It was mostly in ten pound notes; there were lots. He looked at the big brown rectangles of paper; the Queen looked nice, the way he liked to think his mother must have looked. Florence Nightingale, on the back, on the other hand, reminded him of some of the nurses at the home he'd gone to.
He put the money away, stuffing it into his back pocket. He looked round his room, over the walls of books, the pile of clothes by the side of his bed, the hunchback of jackets and shirts and coat and ties on the back of the door, the large wardrobe where he'd kept all his books originally, and still had lots of them stored in shoeboxes, the small bedside cabinet with a plastic glass of water and his latest book lying on it. The room had an old, blocked-off fireplace, where his two-bar electric fire sat. On the mantelpiece was his collection of car mascots.
There were five Jaguars, eight Rolls-Royce silver ladies, two old Austin signs, and a varied collection of leaping salmon, racing horses, pedigree dogs and one cricketer, wielding a bat. He still, to his disappointment, had no Bentley mascots. He kept the Mercedes signs in a big jar at one end of the mantelpiece. He wasn't really bothered about Mercedes signs, but somehow his original reason for hacksawing the mascots off cars - his own safety - had been complicated by the collector's urge to add depth and breadth to the collection.
Originally he had taken offence at Jaguar mascots; the leaping cat, no longer on every car, but still in actual, solid form on quite enough, seemed designed to disembowel him. The silver lady was little better, and some of the custom-made special mascots were even worse. He thought they were illegal, but when he went to the Police Station in Upper Street to complain that people were riding around in these lethally armed cars, the bored-looking sergeant had just looked at him and eventually said well there wasn't a lot he could do about it and sir would just have to look both ways before crossing the street (Steven had been disappointed about that, but on the other hand he was most impressed that a policeman had called him "sir'). They weren't usually helpful, and of course it was obvious that at least some of them must be in on the whole secret of Grout's Torment, but even so, you couldn't help but admire them and look up to them, and to have one call him "sir" was rather good. He went back a few weeks later to report the theft of a bicycle he didn't even own, just so that he could be called "sir" again.
Taking the car mascots was often dangerous. Several times he had almost been caught by enraged owners when they heard some noises in the street outside, in the darkness, or heard feet crunch in a twilit driveway.
Steven had stuck to the immediate area at first; Islington, especially Canonbury, and the quiet streets around Highbury Fields. Then the pickings became leaner as people were careful not to leave their cars in shady spots and parked them only under lamp-posts, or were more conscientious about putting their cars in their drives or garages, and locking the gates.
Steven, hacksaw in pocket, had accordingly widened his area of operations, and now was liable to strike anywhere from the City to Highgate, capturing jaguars, kidnapping silver ladies and pocketing stars. He certainly felt a lot safer walking about the streets, holding his breath between the parked cars and trucks, keeping an eye out for low walls and raised doorsteps he could also use to escape from the lasers in the passing vehicles, knowing that a good few of those growling death-traps had been made that little bit safer thanks to him.
Then he had started to think about bikes; motorbikes could be pretty deadly, too. They were usually driven by suicidal exhibitionists, and just the sound of them had given Steven some terrible frights in the past, and made him hate the people who rode them.
So he'd started putting sugar in their fuel tanks; that was what he'd been doing the previous evening, down in Clerkenwell. He'd been out until two in the morning, and had been chased by a security guard who'd seen him fiddling with a bike's fuel tank in a car park. Steven had been very nervous and excited when he got back, and even though he felt very tired he had taken a long time to get to sleep. Maybe that was why he'd been on a short fuse this morning.
Well, he didn't care; that was their problem, back at the depot. They'd see, when those holes in Upper Street which he had repaired were still intact after all theirs had opened up again. Let them worry about all that. He didn't regret sugaring bikes" tanks and scalping car mascots in the least. He wasn't even just doing it for himself, after all. Although of course he was the most important person, he was doing everybody else- all these people walking in Packington Street, for example - a favour as well.
Steven hung the small towel on the back of the chair by the window. He looked through the pile of clothes hung on the back of his door until he found a cleanish shirt, and put it on. There was a can of Right Guard under his bed which he used to spray under his arms when he remembered, but it had run out last week and he kept forgetting to get a new one. He tucked his shirt into his trousers.