Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

“Where did you live before that?”

“Dunno. One time I slept on me mate’s floor. But his floor got took up. They came from the council. The rat officer.”

“That was unlucky. People say—Evan, the man next door, he says—that you’re never more than three feet from a rat in Britain today. Or is it two feet?” She frowned. “So when the floor was taken up, was that when you went to the garden centre?”

“No, next I went in the park under the bandstand. With Pinto. My mate. Whose floor got took up. We used to go down Sheerwater, they had a drop-in centre. One day we get there and they’ve put steel shutters up. They said, it’s just a policy, don’t take it to heart.”

Mart wore a khaki jacket with lots of pockets, and beneath it a sweatshirt that was once a colour, and stained cotton pants with some rips in them. I’ve seen worse things, Alison thought, in the silence of the night.

“Look,” she said, “don’t misunderstand me, I have no right to ask you questions, but if you’re going to be in my garden for much more of today I would like to know if you’re violent, or on drugs.”

Mart lurched sideways. Though he was young, his joints creaked and snapped. Al saw that he had been sitting on a rucksack. It was a flat one, with very little in it. Perhaps he was trying to hatch something, she thought; some possessions. She felt a rush of pity; her face flushed. It’s not an easy life in a shed.

“You feeling all right?” Mart asked her. Out of his rucksack he took a collection of pill bottles and passed them to her one by one.

“Oh, but these drugs are from the chemist,” she said. “So that’s all right.” She peered at the label. “My mum used to have these. And these, too, I think.” She unscrewed the cap and put a finger in, swizzling the capsules around. “I recognize the colour. I don’t think she liked those ones.”

“Those are nice rings you’ve got,” he said.

“They’re my lucky opals.”

“That’s where I went wrong,” Mart said. “No luck.”

As she passed him the bottles back, she noticed that the surface of the stones had turned a sulky, resistant blue. Stuff you, she thought, I’m not going to be told what to do by a bunch of opals. Mart stowed the bottles carefully in his rucksack.

“So,” she said, “have you been in hospital recently?”

“You know, here and there,” Mart said. “On and off. As and when. I was going to be in a policy, but then they never.”

“What policy was that?”

Mart struggled. “A policy, it’s like … it’s either like, shutting down, or it’s like, admissions, or it’s … removals. You go to another place. But not with a removal van. Because you haven’t anything to put in one.”

“So when you—when they—when they get a new policy, you get moved to somewhere else?”

“More or less,” Mart said. “But they didn’t get one, or I wasn’t in for it. I don’t know if they put me down for it under another name, but I didn’t get moved, so I just went, after a bit I just went.”

“And this drop-in centre, is it still closed?”

“Dunno,” Mart said. “I couldn’t go to Sheerwater on the off-chance, with shoes like mine.”

She looked at his feet and thought, I see what you mean. She said, “I could drive you. That would save you wearing your shoes out any more. But my friend’s gone out in our car. So if you could just hide here till she comes back?”

“I dunno,” Mart said. “Could I have a sandwich?”

“Yes,” she said. She added bitterly, “There’s plenty of bread.”

Back in the kitchen, she thought, I see it all. Mother scooped into hospital at the last minute, the foetal heart monitor banging away like the bells of hell. Mama unregistered, unweighed, unloved, innocent of antenatal care, and turning up at the hospital because she believes—God love her—that her cramping needs relief: then sweat-streaked, panicked and amazed, she is crying out so hard for a glass of water that by the time they give it her, she prefers a glass of water to her newborn child. She would have sold him, new as he was, in his skin. She would have sold him to the midwives for an early relief from her thirst.

What can I give him? Alison wondered. What would he enjoy? Poor little bugger. You see somebody like that and say, well, his mother must have loved him; but in his case, no. She took out a cold chicken from the fridge and turned it out from its jellied, splintering foil. It was half used, half stripped. She washed her hands, opened a drawer, picked out a sharp little knife and worked away, shearing fragments from the carcass. Close to the bone, the meat was tender. So was the child Mart himself, picked out of the womb; as he was carried away, his legs kicked, the blood on his torso staled and dried.

And then the foster mother. Who stuck for a year or two. Till a policy moved him on to the next. I wish I’d had a foster mother, Al thought. If I’d just been given a break till I was two or three, I might have turned out normal, instead of my brain all cross-wired so I’m forced to know the biographies of strangers. And pity them.

By the time she’d thought all this, she was grilling bacon. As she whipped the rashers over with the tongs, she thought, why am I doing this? God knows. I feel sorry for the bloke. Homeless and down on his luck.

She made towering, toasted sandwiches, oiled with mayonnaise, garnished with cucumber, cherry tomatoes and hardboiled eggs. She made twice as many as one homeless mad person could possibly consume. She made what she anticipated would be the very best plate of sandwiches Mart had ever seen in his life.

He ate them without comment, except for saying, “Not very good bacon, this. You ought to get that kind that is made by the Prince of Wales.”

Sometimes he said, “Aren’t you having one?” but she knew he hoped she wasn’t, and she said, “I’ll have mine later.” She glanced at her watch. “Is that the time? I’ve got a telephone client.”

“I used to have a watch,” Mart said. “But Police Constable Delingbole stamped on it.” He looked up at her from the corner and begged, “Don’t be long.”

Lucky that Colette had gone to Guildford! Al could count on her to be away for some hours. In that time she could give the boy some advice and twenty quid, and set him on his way. Colette had things to do—pop into the occult shop on White Lion Walk with some flyers, etc.—but mainly she would be going shopping, trawling around the House of Fraser for that elusive perfect lip shade, and getting her hair cut into a white pudding-bowl shape. Colette’s hair never seemed to grow, not so that you noticed, yet she felt some sort of social obligation to have it trimmed and tweaked every six weeks. When she came home she would stand before the mirror and rage at the stylist, but it never looked any different—not that Alison could see.

Her telephone consultation ran the full hour, and after it Al was so hungry that she had to grab a bowl of cornflakes, standing up in the kitchen. A feeling, something like fellow-feeling, was hauling her back in the direction of Mart; she hated to think of him shrinking from the light, crouching on the hard floor.

“First I was a white-liner,” Mart said. “That’s where you paint lines on the road, excellent daily rate and no previous experience required. A truck picked us up every morning at the bandstand and took us to where we were lining that day. You see, Pinto was with me. He got bored of it. I didn’t get bored of it, I liked it. But Pinto, he started painting little islands in the road, then he said, go on, go on, let’s do a box junction. It took us an hour. But when they saw it, they weren’t all that keen. They said, you’re off the job, mate, and the ganger said, come here while I give you a smack with this shovel.” Mart rubbed his head, his eyes distant. “But then they said, we’ll give you another chance, you can go on roadworks. We got put on human traffic light. Twirling a sign: STOP__GO. But the motorists wouldn’t observe me. Stop-and-go when they fucking well liked. So the boss says, lads, you’re not in sync. He says that’s your big problem that you’ve got. You’re twirling, but you’re not twirling in sync. So I got took off that job.”