Michael Dibdin - The Tryst

But there was another and deeper reason for the boy’s satisfaction. Ever since the time when his collection of snapshot memories had been taken, he had been surrounded by people whose job was to look after him. However kind they were, he could never forget that they were paid to care. They fed and clothed and sheltered him because doing so provided their own food, clothes and shelter. They were really caring for themselves, not him at all. Of course there might be something else there, something real, but you could never prove it. Sometimes the other boys tried to do so by acting impossible, smashing the place up or trying to kill themselves, but what good was that? If the social workers and house parents continued to accept you however badly you behaved, it just proved how badly they needed the money. Steve felt sorry for these official minders, their lives made a misery by little shits like him. He wouldn’t have done their job, not for anything.

What had attracted him to the stotters was that they’d taken him on of their own free will. At the same time he knew it had really been a freak, a whim which had briefly flared in the darkness of Jimmy’s brain and which he’d imposed on the others in a fit of pique. Besides, they never allowed Steve to forget that he was dependent on them, a household pet who would be abandoned the moment they lost interest in him. With the old man it was different. The old man needed him. Again, there were moments when Steve wondered if perhaps there was more to it than that, love or whatever it was called. But the boy knew that you couldn’t build on anything as vague and feeble as that. Need was the stuff, need you could count on. He still didn’t understand what created Ernest Matthews’s need, why he couldn’t just go out and do things for himself like everyone else. Presumably it had something to do with the man Steve had nicknamed Hazchem. The story the old man was telling him would make all that clear. In any case, it wasn’t important. All that mattered was the need itself. It was as real as money: warm and smelling of people, of their dirt and their weakness. And Steve had a pocketful of it!

Friday being pay-day, all the tills at the checkout were busy. The trolleys lined up one behind the other, piled high with sliced white, washing powder, baked beans, ice cream, dog food and toilet rolls. Stunned-looking men with tattooed biceps and soft tummies stood awkwardly beside women in whose faces beauty came and went like the picture on a poorly tuned television set. Both sexes looked prematurely old, exhausted and bewildered, casualties of some routine disaster. Around their legs children clung and stumbled, their faces smudged with bruises, red with tears, cuts below their eyes.

Some one pushed Steve roughly from behind.

‘Fuck you doing here?’

It was Dave and wee Alex, with a trolley full of cans of lager. Dave gave the boy an even more meaningful punch.

‘Asked you a question, wanker!’

‘Shopping,’ Steve said.

Dave pawed through the contents of his basket.

‘Who’s this shit for? Where you get the money, you little fucker?’

‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul,’ muttered Alex.

‘It’s for this old bloke,’ Steve explained. ‘He can’t get out. He’s crippled.’

‘ You’ll be fucking crippled, time I’ve finished with you,’ Dave snapped.

At that moment the security guard intervened. A huge West Indian who never stopped smiling, he looked like a black Santa Claus.

‘Now then, lads, let’s calm down,’ he said in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere beneath the floor. He was still smiling merrily. Dave backed away, scowling.

‘They giving you any trouble?’ the guard asked Steve.

‘No, it’s all right. I know them.’

The guard moved away, but not very far. He kept an eye on the trio while Steve unloaded his basket and paid, under Dave’s and Alex’s hostile scrutiny. When he had packed the shopping into the orange sling, the boy walked quickly to the door without looking back. Once outside he started to run. His plan was to make it as far as the public lavatory by the park and hide in the cubicle with the broken window. It was only a temporary respite, of course. They’d get him when he came home. But at least it would give Dave a chance to cool down a little. The shopping was heavy and awkward to run with, but Steve hurried on as best he could. When he reached the lavatory, he stopped and looked round. There was no sign of Dave and Alex. They probably hadn’t even bothered to try to catch him. Steve always tended to overestimate the stotters’ energy. He slipped inside and sat down in his favourite cublicle.

The story on which his eye usually fell first, because of its position, was so squeezed in that the final words of each line had been pushed up on to the door frame. The story itself Steve found particularly obscure, since it lacked the usual terms for the parts of the body and the things people did with them. It began ‘THIS SCHOOLGIRL ASKED ME TO EAT HER OUT FIRST I LICKED HER LITTLE BUSH IT FELT SO GOOD I THOUGHT I WOULD DIE SO SHE BEGGED ME TO STICK MY TONGUE DEEP IN HER BOX AND I DID IT TASTED LIKE HEAVEN’, after which the writing became increasingly vertical and eventually slipped off the wall altogether in a rather pedestrian ending including such details as the fact that the schoolgirl in question was only thirteen and came there every week looking for older men. Steve leant back, the downpipe of the toilet pressing against his back like a second spinal column, trying to work out what the story was about. It seemed to involve a meal the writer had had with someone he loved, but the details escaped him.

When Steve came out of the lavatory it had started to drizzle. He hurried on along Paxton Grove, half-walking and half-running over the cracked uneven slabs. The house in Grafton Avenue seemed cosier and safer and more welcoming than ever that day. Ernest Matthews’s high tea the week before had been such a success that the old man had decided to make it a regular event. The water was already bubbling in an enamel saucepan on the stove, and while Steve unpacked and put away the rest of the shopping Matthews lowered the eggs in one by one, tut-tutting when one of them cracked, releasing a milky cloud. He stood in front of the stove, watch in hand like a station-master, until the statutory three minutes had elapsed. Then the eggs were promptly rushed to the table, where Steve demonstrated that he had mastered the art of opening them correctly. Then they ate, soaking up the runny yolk with strips of buttered bread before taking up their spoons to excavate the white.

Afterwards, as Steve sat looking round at the sideboard laden with nameless oddities, he realized for the first time what made this room feel so special, so different from any other: you couldn’t have won anything in it on that television game show. Steve had always assumed that everything had a price the same way it had a name. But the old man’s room was full of things that had neither. They seemed to have sprung magically out of nowhere, their very existence a scandal.

‘Where you get all this stuff?’ the boy demanded finally.

‘It was here before I came. All in different rooms, scattered throughout the house. I brought it all in here, what I wanted. Some of it was my mother’s, you see.’

But for some reason Steve didn’t want to see.

‘When you going to get on with the story?’ he asked, glancing pointedly at the clock.

‘My, but we’re impatient today!’ Matthews remarked. ‘Very well, then. Where were we?’

‘Hiding behind the hedge listening to the man telling his friend about the woman he’d seen,’ the boy promptly replied. The fact that he didn’t believe the old man’s tale actually made it easier for him to remember, just as the things that he and the stotters watched on TV always seemed more real than what happened in between.