A Traitor to Memory

There were whispers, of course. There were rumours. Both fueled his passion to be gone forever. And forever was what he thought he'd achieved, a kind of eternal paradise defined by a Dutch-fronted house in Kensington, the kind of house so grand it had a medallion carved 1879 on its gable. And this house was peopled as grandly as it was situated, much to his delight. A war hero, a child prodigy, a for-God's-sake governess for that child, a foreign nanny … Nothing could have been more different to where he'd come from: Tower Hamlets via a bed-sit in Hammersmith and a fortune spent on learning everything from how to say haricots verts and knowing what it meant to how to use cutlery instead of one's fingers for moving bits of food round one's plate. So when he'd finally reached Kensington Square, no one knew. Least of all Katja, who would never have known, having not had a lifetime of instruction on what it meant to say lounge at an inopportune time.

And then she'd got pregnant, the worst sort of getting pregnant. Unlike his mum, who'd carried on during her pregnancies as if growing a child inside her body were nothing more than a minor inconvenience causing her to switch to a different set of clothes for a few months, Katja'd had no easy time of it, which made her condition impossible to hide. And from that pregnancy had risen everything else, including his own past, threatening to seep from the splitting pipes of their life in Kensington Square like the sewage it was.

Even after all that, he'd thought he could escape it again. James Pitchford, whose past had hung over him like Damocles' sword, just waiting to be smeared across the tabloids as Lodger Once Investigated in Cot Death, just waiting to be revealed as Jimmy Pytches: all aitches dropped and tee-aitches said as effs, Jimmy Pytches the subject of laughter for trying to be better than he was. So he changed again, morphed himself into J. W. Pitchley, ace investor and financial wizard, but running, always running, and always to run.

Which brought him to Tower Hamlets now: a man who'd come to accept the fact that to escape what he could not bear to face, he could kill himself, he could change his identity yet another time, or he could flee forever, not only the teeming city of London but everything that London—and England—represented.

He parked the Boxter near the tower block that had been his childhood home. He looked round and saw that little had changed, including the presence of local skinheads, three of them this time, who smoked in the doorway of a nearby shop, watching him and his car with studied attention. He called out to them, “Want to make ten quid?”

One of them spat a gob of yellowish sputum into the street. “Each?” he said.

“All right. Each.”

“What's to do, then?”

“Keep an eye on the motor for me. See that no one touches it. Okay?”

They shrugged. Pitchley took this for assent. He nodded at them, saying, “Ten now, twenty later.”

“Give,” said their leader, and he slouched over for the cash.

As he handed the ten-pound note over to the thug, Pitchley realised the bloke might well be his youngest half brother, Paul. It had been more than twenty years since he'd seen little Paulie. What an irony it would be if he were handing over what went for extorted dosh to his own brother without either of them knowing who the other was. But that was the case for most of his siblings now. For all he knew, there might even be more of them than the five there were when he did his runner.

He entered the tower block estate: a patch of dead lawn, chalk hopscotch squares drawn drunkenly on the uneven tarmac, a deflated football with a knife gouge in it, two shopping trolleys overturned and rendered wheel-less. Three little girls were attempting to inline skate on one of the concrete paths, but its condition was as bad as the tarmac's, so they'd get about two and a half yards of even ground to glide on before they had to clomp over or around a spot where the concrete looked as if the bomb squad might want to come to have a look for a UXB.

Pitchley made his way to the tower block's lift and found that it was out of service. A block-lettered sign informed him of this, hanging on old chrome doors long ago decorated by the resident spray-paint artists.

He set off up the stairs, seven flights of them. She loved—as she said—“'aving me a bit of a view.” This was important since she never did anything but stand, sit, lounge, smoke, drink, eat, or watch telly in that sagging-seat chair that had stood forever next to the window.

He was out of breath by the second floor. He had to pause on the landing and breathe deeply of its urine-scented air before climbing upwards. When he got to the fifth floor, he stopped again. By the seventh, his armpits were dripping.

He rubbed down his neck as he walked to the door of her flat. He never suffered a moment's doubt that she would be there. Jen Pytches would move her arse only if the building were going up in flames. And even then she'd complain about it: “Wha' abou' me programme on the telly?”

He rapped on the door. From within he heard the sound of chatter, television voices that marked the time of day. Chat shows in the morning, afternoon and it was snooker—God only knew why—and evening brought the soaps.

No answer to his knock, so Pitchley rapped again, louder this time, and he called out, “Mum?” He tried the door and found it unlocked. He opened it a crack and said, “Mum?” another time.

She said, “Who's it, then? That you, Paulie? You been to the job centre already, 'ave you? Don' think so, lad. Don' be trying to pull the wool over, you go' tha’, son? I wasn' born this morning.” She coughed the deep, phlegm-cursed cough of the forty-year smoker as Pitchley used the tips of his fingers to move the door inward.