34
Friday, 27 April 2012
Jack slotted the glass back into the basement window, impatient to get to the streets in the attic. He had been stuck in a tunnel outside Hammersmith Broadway for an hour while a broken-down Richmond train was towed to the depot.
He didn’t consider the miniature cityscape a model; it was another dimension of reality. He knew from his nocturnal journeys that the buildings, roads, alleyways and even the trees were faithful renditions of Hammersmith. He didn’t understand how this was possible. The old man could hardly walk and never left the house.
Jack had divined that the woman, because she had kept his street atlas and had the photograph of the family in her bedroom, was a Host. Yet she didn’t fit the profile. He couldn’t sense evil in her eyes or in her aura. She appeared to show no interest in the streets in the attic and rarely lingered there. She had no idea he was there and, emboldened, he stayed longer working with the old man in companionable silence, as he had with his father. He would not ask about the A–Z; he didn’t want his motive mistaken. They repaired roofs and camber, replaced straggling trees with pollarded versions to clear the way for buses and other high-sided vehicles. The old man went to bed at ten and Jack left for his driving shifts. He compiled for Jack a list of alterations and repairs which, returning in the small hours and working by the light of a lamp strapped to his head, Jack completed for when the man started the next morning.
Jack was there under false pretences. He should try to retrieve his A–Z – once he had it, he must leave. Lured by the attic streets, he was losing his touch. If the woman was a True Host, capable of killing and feeling nothing, and the photograph by her bed suggested this, he should take action. Yet he did not.
He stopped off in his dormitory. He froze. The difference was minimal: most would miss it; the book that had been on Colin’s bed open and spine up was now closed and by the bed. He should pack up and leave. Stella would be appalled if she knew. In fact he’d been so keen to get here he had forgotten to call her after leaving Amanda’s. She believed they were a team; he was letting her down. He crept over to his bed and, squatting down, punched in her number.
‘Stella Darnell. Please leave a message…’
Jack ended the call. Leaving the dormitory, he went to the stairs and continued upwards.
‘You’re late.’
‘Got held up.’ Jack gathered up the skirts of his coat and ducked into the crawl space.
‘Test the tunnel walls. You made them too narrow. A train was stuck there.’
Jack surveyed the tunnel he had been stuck in. He did not explain about the faulty Richmond train: his father had hated excuses. He depressed the button on the console and set the District line train in motion. It clunked along the track, the sound a replica of life. Jack gripped the lever, the curving brickwork sliding up and over his cab. The dusty yellow headlamps lit the silver rails. The train took the bend outside Hammersmith Broadway and on to Barons Court where Stella’s mother lived. The man was repairing a gas leak on Fulham Palace Road near the hospital. He was wrong about the width of the tunnel, but Jack knew better than to say. His father didn’t brook criticism. For good measure he pared at the walls, careful to avoid puncturing or ripping the gauze.
After this he set to work on the road by the brewery leading down from the water tower. Undergoing conversion to flats, the tower was caged in scaffolding as it was in life. Jack repaired a freeze-thaw crater in the tarmac and meandered down to the Eyot. Here the tide regularly flooded up to the opposite pavement. It was out now, so he cleared away debris washed up from the riverbed: twigs, takeaway cartons, lengths of twine. Using a toothbrush he scrubbed at slime on the kerbs. This time, in tune with the school, he heard the front door shutting far below.
‘I have to go.’
The old man did not reply.
Even before his Host had mounted the stairs, Jack was in his dormitory. He gazed out of the window at the orange-tinted sky noting her step was slower tonight. As he expected, she paused on the landing, but still he tensed. The repositioning of the book told him that, a good housemother, she checked the dorms.
He heard her go on up the stairs and, opening his door, crept along the passage to the landing. Her head was bowed, her breathing stertorous. Jack had learnt to hide with scant cover. Most people looked in obvious places like attics, cupboards and wardrobes in spare rooms and did not consider shallow alcoves or pools of shadow. Jack hid in what amounted to nowhere, where not even a True Host with a mind like his own thought to check.
Her shadow receded on the wall; the angle of the light made her monstrous, the curving shadow of the balustrade providing a backdrop as if she was caged.
There was a bang and then a knocking. An object shot down the stairwell and bounced against a banister. It skittered on to the tiles in the hall below. Jack melted into the black of the corridor and flattened himself beside the open fire door. She made her laborious way down the stairs. He knew enough about his Host to perceive that tonight she was untypically clumsy.
She was talking; he couldn’t catch the words. His mouth went dry. There was someone with her. Surely he would have felt their presence. She had dropped her telephone and the banister had broken its fall. He glided down the stairs and stopped at the turn in the staircase before his own shadow projected on the wall.
Her voice dropped, Jack only caught snatches: ‘…sorry… full diary… Cheltenham…’ Her soothing tone implied a lover. True Hosts rarely had partners.
She said goodbye. Jack took the stairs and gained the landing ahead of her. She was wheezing and he was tempted to race back down and lend her his arm. From his vantage point by the fire door he watched her pass by, her phone in one hand and a book in the other. He imagined she was a ghost, condemned to wander the corridor of the building forever. She stopped. She sensed him.
Jack had forgotten to switch his own phone off. He got few calls: from London Underground and from Stella. Both could ring anytime. He willed it to stay silent. If he reached for it she would feel a shift in the air. From two metres away she must hear his heart smashing against his ribs. She was fumbling with a book, fanning the pages as if she had lost her place. His London A–Z. She was writing something in a flipover pad like a police officer’s.
Jack saw why she went out at night. The woman wasn’t following him. She used his street atlas to collect details of London to report back to her father so he could adapt or change buildings, signs, minor details on his model. She had probably walked every street in Hammersmith. Jack felt an oblique envy. His Host’s journeys had tangible purpose.
She switched on the landing light. All she had to do was look to her left and she would see him. Jack was paralysed by thrilling fear. She knew where he went; she had his journeys.
Upstairs she would quietly confirm her suspicion that her father had received a visitor. In absolute control of events, she would turn back her father’s bed, lay out his incontinence pads, boil a kettle for his nightcap. She would bide her time.
It was pitch dark when Jack eased into bed. He wrapped his coat close; it crackled. He felt in the pocket and found the newspaper cutting he had taken from Amanda Hampson’s house that morning. He had not told Stella his suspicions about Charlie Hampson: she would be annoyed he was, as she would put it, ‘up to his old tricks’. He must ring, or she would wonder where he was.
Jack dipped under the blankets and for the second time that night dialled her mobile. He imagined Stella pottering about her father’s house inventing tasks, reasons to stay. She was unable to move into or to sell Terry Darnell’s old home.
‘Stella Darnell.’
‘It’s Jack,’ he breathed.
‘Please leave a message after…’ It had gone to voicemail, almost as if Stella had cut the line. She wouldn’t have done that.
He lay back on the unyielding pillow. Last night when he called, Stella wasn’t at Terry’s, nor when they met had she said where she was. He felt creeping unease. Softly he began to sing to himself:
‘Mary had a little lamb,
Little lamb, little lamb,
Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow…’
Jack fell asleep without finishing the first verse.