David Mitchell - Slade House

I press my forehead against the window. In the street below Fred Pink’s still having his “quick catch-up with Misters Benson and Hedges.” The streetlights are coming on. The sun sinks into tarmac-gray clouds, over one-way mazes of brick houses, gasworks, muddy canals, old factories, unloved blocks of flats from the sixties, multi-story car parks from the seventies; tatty-looking housing from the eighties; a neon-edged multiplex from the nineties. Cul-de-sacs, ring-roads, bus lanes, flyovers. I wish Sally’s last known place of abode could have been prettier. For the millionth time I wonder if she’s still alive, locked in a madman’s attic, praying that we’ll never give up, never stop looking. Always I wonder. Sometimes I envy the weeping parents of the definitely dead you see on TV. Grief’s an amputation, but hope’s incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat but with a box you can never get open. For the millionth time, I flinch about wriggling out of inviting my sister to New York the summer before she started uni here. Sally wanted to visit, I knew, but I had a job at a photo agency, fashionista friends, invitations to private views, and I was just starting to date women. It was an odd time. Discovering my Real Me and babysitting my tubby, dorky, nervy sister just felt all too much. So I told Sal some bullshit about finding my feet, she pretended to believe me, and I’ll never forgive myself. Avril says that not even God can change the past. True, but I still can’t forgive myself. I get out my mobile and text Avril:

At pub. Real dive. FP no nutter so far but we’ll see.

Interview begins in a mo. Home when I can. Xxx

SEND. Avril will be heating up yesterday’s lasagna, opening a bottle of wine, settling down to an episode or three of The Wire . Wish I was with her. I’ve known livelier morgues than The Fox and Hounds. The whiskery landlady tried to crack a funny when we came in: “Evening, dearie, you must be Our Fred’s latest girlfriend, then. Fred, you dark horse, you — what magazine you order this one out of, eh?” I should’ve said, “ Hot Ukrainian Dykes Weekly .” When the landlady learned I’m a journalist with an interest in Slade Alley, she turned frosty and her “dearie” grew thorns: “That’s the media for you, innit? Why let a sleeping dog lie when you can flog a dead horse, eh, dearie? Eh?”

Footsteps clomp up the stairs. I get out my Sony digital recorder, a gift from Dad and Sook, AKA Mrs. John Timms III, and put it on the table. In walks Fred Pink, a withered gray man in a tatty brown coat and a schoolboy’s leather satchel that looks half a century old. “Sorry to keep you, Miss Timms. I do need my little fix.” He’s got a gruff, friendly voice you want to trust.

“No problem,” I say. “Will this table do?”

“Best seat in the house, I’d say.” He puts his beer on the table, sits down like the old man he is and rubs his skin-and-bone hands. His face is pocked, saggy, and spiky with bristles. His glasses are fixed with duct tape. “Bloomin’ parky out. This smoking ban’ll be the death of us, I tell you: if cancer don’t get us, the double pneumonia will. Still can’t get my head round not smoking — in a pub? Political correctness gone mad, and brought in by a Labor government. Ever interview Tony Blair or Gordon Brown or that lot, do you, in your line of work?”

“Only in press packs. You have to be at the top of the food chain for a private audience. Mr. Pink, could I record our interview? That way I can concentrate on what you’re saying without taking notes.”

“Record away.” He doesn’t add, “and call me Fred,” so I won’t.

I press RECORD and speak into the microphone: “Interview with Fred Pink at The Fox and Hounds pub, Saturday twenty-seventh October, 2006, 7:20 P.M.” I swivel the recorder so the mike’s facing him. “Ready when you are.”

The old man takes a deep breath. “Well. Once you’ve been a psychiatric patient, no one gives you the benefit of the doubt again. Easier to fix a bad credit rating than a bad credibility rating.” Fred Pink speaks with care, as if he’s writing his words in permanent ink. “But whether you believe me or not, Miss Timms, I’m guilty. Guilty. See, I’m the one who told my nephew Alan about Slade Alley, about Gordon Edmonds, about Nathan and Rita Bishop, about the nine-year cycle. It was me who whetted Alan’s appetite. Alan’d told me there was twenty or thirty of them in his club so I reckoned, safety in numbers. Atemporals fear exposure, see. Six kids vanishing was big news, but twenty or thirty? They’d never dare. All sorts’d’ve come running: MI7, FBI if any Americans were involved, my friend David Icke; the whole bloomin’ shebangle’d be all over Slade House like a dose of the clap. If I’d known Alan’s group was down to six, I’d’ve told him, “Too risky, just forget it.” And if I’d done that, my nephew, and your sister, and Lance Matthews, Todd Cosgrove, Angelica Gibbons and Fern Penhaligon, they’d still be in here, living their lives, with jobs, boyfriends, girlfriends, mortgages. Knowing that’s a torment, Miss Timms. A torment.” Fred Pink swallows, clenches his jaw and shuts his eyes. I write “Atemporal?” and “David Icke” in my notebook to give him time to compose himself. “Sorry, Miss Timms, I …”

“I’ve got regrets about Sally too,” I assure him. “But I think you’re being too harsh on yourself.”

Fred Pink dabs his eyes with an old tissue and sips his bitter.

“In your email you mentioned a backstory, Mr. Pink,” I say.

“I did. The backstory’s why I asked to meet you here this evening, so I can tell it you face to face. On the phone, you’d hang up. In places, you’ll think, ‘Ruddy Nora, the mad old wreck’s lost the plot.’ But hear me out. It leads to Sally. Trust on me on this.”

“I’m a journalist. I know reality’s complex.” I remember Avril using those very words — a “mad old wreck”—when she read Fred Pink’s first email a couple of weeks ago. But I tell the old man, “I’m listening.”

“We’ll kick off over a century ago then, near Ely in Norfolk, at a stately home called Swaffham Manor. Nowadays a Saudi Arabian pal of Prince Charles owns the place, but back then it was the ancestral seat of a family called the Chetwynd-Pitts, who you’ll find in the Domesday Book, if you please. In 1899, twins was born at Swaffham, a girl and a boy. Not in the big house, mind, but in the gamekeeper’s cottage on the edge of the estate. The father was Gabriel Grayer, the mother was his wife Nellie Grayer, and the twins were named Norah and Jonah. They never got to know their father that well, ’cause Gabriel Grayer got shot three years later by a toff who mistook the peasant for a pheasant, so to speak. Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt felt guilty about the accident, so they let Nellie Grayer and the children stay on in the gamekeeper’s cottage. More than that, they took care of Norah and Jonah’s schooling, and when Nellie Grayer died of rheumatic fever in 1910, the twin orphans moved into Swaffham Manor proper.”

“You’ve done a lot of research,” I tell Fred Pink.

“It’s my hobby, like. Well, my life, really. You should see my flat. It’s all papers and files, everywhere. Now: you’ll have heard stories about the empathy between twins, I’m guessing. Y’know, where one twin gets hit by a bus in Istanbul, say, and the other falls over in London at the exact same moment. But did you know that twins’ll sometimes speak a language that only they understand, specially when they’re still learning to talk?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. When I lived in Manhattan I used to babysit for toddler triplets who talked in their own private dialect. It was amazing to hear.”