Michael Dibdin - The Tryst

A silence fell. The old man looked at the boy and shrugged. He looked dull and diminished. Steve stood up, taking his orange sling.

‘I got to be going.’

‘Will you come again, now you know the danger?’ Matthews asked him anxiously.

‘What you mean?’

‘Why, you’ve seen him yourself! You said you saw him watching the house, following you home. If he knows you’re helping me then he’ll try and destroy you too.’

Steve shook his head awkwardly.

‘It isn’t the same person.’

Matthews snorted indignantly.

‘How do you know?’

‘All those blokes, they were older than you, right? The one I seen is only about twenty, twenty-five.’

The old man stared at the boy in silence.

‘Why, you don’t think he’s alive , do you?’ he exclaimed.

Steve walked home slowly, pushing against a strengthening wind which was breaking up the cloud cover. Well, he would have told it differently, that was all he could say. He’d have had hidden treasure, a big chest stuffed with gold and jewels which the old man had taken from the place in the country after the brothers got killed and kept in a room somewhere at the top of the house, where no one ever went. Hazchem would have been the son of Maurice and the woman on the lawn, so the treasure belonged to him, or at least he reckoned it did, which was why he kept watching Matthews’s house. That sounded much more likely than all the stuff about ghosts and devils. The boy’s doubts about Ernest Matthews had been proved too right. Houses under the sea and rich people living in cemeteries had turned out to be the least of it, in the end. Matthews’s fear itself was fake. The danger and mystery which had haunted these streets for weeks, lending drama to Steve’s life, stood revealed as nothing more than the pathetic delusions of an old man who’d lost his mind somewhere along the way.

Even decorating a garage door and a pillar-box with EAT SHIT DIE BOX didn’t help. It wasn’t until Steve reached Trenchant Road that he forgot all about his disappointment and the old man. It was at once obvious that something out of the ordinary had happened: the corrugated iron fence that surrounded the house had been torn down and the garden churned into a slurry of mud in the midst of which lay piles of wooden hoarding and bundles of barbed wire. At the side of the house nearest the corner stood a large skip covered with a tarpaulin, and a yellow bulldozer. There was no one about. Whoever had done all this had gone away again, for the moment. The boy walked round the corner, then doubled back across the end of the ruined wilderness, thankful that it was starting to get dark by now. He paused in a patch of undergrowth which the bulldozer had missed, crouching down and sniffing the dense rank odour of the nettles, listening intently. All was quiet. He scurried over the open ground, skidding on the slippery gashes of bare clay, to the back door. He wriggled past the plywood screen, inside the house.

The passageway was dark, but a glow up ahead showed that a light was on in the living room. The boy picked his way along the exposed floor joists and odd patches of floorboard that hadn’t gone into the fire. Dave’s ravages had left a gap of almost a yard between a joist at the door and the beginning of the flooring, making it impossible to come into the room gradually. Steve stood there for several minutes, craning his neck and trying to make sense of the faint noises he could hear. It was a mumbling sound, rather like a baby. In the end he took a deep breath and jumped.

On one of the mattresses lay Tracy, the earphones of the Walkman almost lost in her hair. She was wearing a pink skirt over black tights and a white T-shirt printed with a cartoon of a leering orange cat and the words ‘Stick with me, kid — we’ll go places’. A bottle of Drambuie was balanced on her stomach, rising and falling with each breath she took. Her little feet twitched in time to the inaudible music and she was half-singing the words. She waved to Steve and pulled the earphones off.

‘Here, have a listen.’

He knelt down and took the flimsy hoop, still warm from the girl’s head. Tracy raised the bottle of Drambuie to her mouth. A bubble of air slipped between her lips and the glass rim and rose slowly through the dense brown liquid. She held the bottle out to Steve. The boy shook his head.

‘Go on! You got to start sometime.’

He took the bottle and their fingers touched for a moment. He tilted it to his mouth, as she had done. The rim was wet, and when the liqueur trickled down his throat, sweet and hot and perfumed, he imagined that he was tasting her saliva. Her body was terrifyingly close to his. All he had to do was reach out and touch her.

‘Where are the others?’ he asked, handing back the bottle.

‘Out looking for a place to stay. Can’t stop here now, can we?’

Tracy’s was not a successful face, which was one reason why Steve liked it. Some faces were like television; there was nothing to do except sit and look at them. But Tracy’s was a d-i-y face. You needed to spend time on it, but it gave you a great sense of satisfaction and achievement. Without make-up, her features looked as raw, vulnerable and unglamorous to Steve as his own. He had never looked at her from so close before. He knew at once that it would be useless to try to hide anything from her. This came as a great relief.

Tracy pressed a button on the Walkman and music abruptly exploded inside Steve’s head. He watched as she started packing her clothes into crumpled plastic bags. The music made her every gesture seem special and significant, like a film. When the song was over, Steve took the earphones off.

‘When we leaving?’ he asked.

‘Later on. This place’ll be gone tomorrow. Funny, isn’t it?’

Although she was only a few yards away, Steve had the feeling that they were separated by an enormous distance.

‘Can I have a bit more of that stuff?’ he asked, to bring her back.

Tracy turned to him, grinning.

‘Can’t get enough once you get started, can you?’

She came and knelt beside him and they both drank. When Tracy started to get up again, she lost her balance and reached for the boy’s shoulder to steady herself. That pushed him over too, and they fell over together on the mattress. The next moment something wet and warm happened to Steve’s face. By the time he realized that Tracy was kissing him, she had finished. She leaned back, staring up at the ceiling. Her face was still only inches from his, yet this distance seemed even more achingly unbridgeable than the one which had separated them earlier. Miniature music leaked from the earphones abandoned on the mattress beside them, mixed in with the hollow booming of the wind in the chimney. Tracy’s hair had started to grow out from the roots again in its natural mousy colour, as though the spell that had temporarily transformed her into a glamorous witch was slowly wearing off.

‘So anyway, what’s this you’ve been getting up to?’ she asked.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Shopping for some old fucker and that.’

She groped for the bottle and had another swig.

‘Well, he can’t get out of the house,’ Steve explained.

‘What, crippled, is he?’

Steve shook his head, then tapped it with two fingers. ‘Bit mental. He lives in this big house, in this one room downstairs, all full of stuff. But he won’t go outside, see? Thinks somebody’s going to do him.’

‘Fuck.’

Tracy sounded impressed.

‘He won’t even open the door, only to me,’ Steve bragged. ‘I got to ring the bell in a special way, otherwise he won’t come.’

‘How do you mean, special?’

‘Like this.’