A Sight for Sore Eyes (11 page)

the grey and greasy square of carpet. At least the shaking had stopped. The urgency of his hunt had somehow allayed that trembling. Back in the front room, avoiding the eyes of dead Keith - how and when had his eyes come open? - Teddy investigated the toolbag, the drinks bags, then turned his attention to the furniture. There were no drawers in here, only shelves made to contain books, but holding instead the clutter and debris characteristic of this household. But no keys, and none either on the table tier under the television set. The kitchen next, an obvious place. Why hadn't he thought of it? Was nothing useful or worth preserving kept in this place? Even as he searched he marvelled at the minds of those who filled drawers and cupboards, jars and vases and even a teapot - unused since the invention of the teabag - with pins and paper-clips and elastic bands and safety-pins and hairclips and screws and drawing-pins and tissues and hair combings, with broken pencils and bits of biscuit and throat pastilles and nail-files and copper coins and shoelaces and aspirins. And even keys, but not the keys. He opened the cupboard over the sink and a bunch of plastic bags fell out. The keys must be in Keith's bedroom. They must be there and somehow he had missed them. The kitchen clock, the only one in the house, told him the time was just after one-thirty. Hours must pass before it grew light, six, seven hours, but still the swift passing of time troubled him. Suppose he never found those keys? Once more into Keith's bedroom. He had looked under the carpet before, but this time he rolled it up. Black beedes scurried away in all directions. Teddy kicked at the full Pyrex casserole, and ash and cigarette stubs scattered everywhere. He went through the drawers again, he looked inside Keith's boots, his smelly trainers, his one pair of good shoes. Teddy's temper was always slow to burst into flames from its steady smouldering, but now it did. The austere faces of the originators of the motor car, gazing so sternly at the window, suddenly enraged him and he tore the magazine cut-outs off the wall. Ferdinand Porsche's portrait was the last to be ripped down and it came away more easily than the others. Necessarily so, since behind it was a hole in the wall, gouged out of the plaster. And in the hole were car keys on a key-ring from which a doll was suspended, a tiny, pink, naked woman. Teddy didn't speculate for long as to what Keith's motives might have been in thus concealing his car keys. No doubt he had suspected Teddy of going joy-riding in his absence, even though he couldn't drive and had often expressed his loathing of the Edsel. He took the keys and went downstairs. His room was freezing cold because he had left the french windows open. Aware that puffing any lights on would be a mistake, he stood shivering, accustoming his eves to the dark. Then he unlocked the car boot and raised the lid. Ample room inside, as he had supposed. Keith was heavy. Was it possible people were heavier dead than alive? Perhaps. He had heard or read somewhere that you were supposed to close the eyes of the dead, had actually seen it done in some television film. But he couldn't bring himself to lay his fingers on Keith's eyes. Soon he would no longer have to see them. He dragged the body through the house in the dark, Keith's quite long hair, released from its band, sweeping the floor. At the french windows he had a momentary fear that he wouldn't be strong enough to lift Keith off the floor and hump him up and into the boot. But the events of the evening were teaching him something. He was learning that if you need to do a thing badly enough, a task demanding physical strength, if you must do it, within reason you can. Keith must have weighed seventeen or eighteen stone. Teddy's heart felt as if it would burst and his arms come out of their sockets as he struggled to lift him. A harness to put on Keith would help, but he knew there was no rope in the house. Drawing deep breaths, he looked up at the windows next door. All was in darkness, all was silent. Yet some faint gleam of light - there is always somewhere, somehow, a sliver of light - touched the shiny slippery plastic that covered the motor bike. Teddy had never bothered to examine it before, had merely glanced at it with distaste. Now he approached it, his eyes growing accustomed to the darkness. It was not a sheet but a bag, a huge bag of plastic that must have been several millimetres thick and measured a good two and a half metres by two. He lifted it off the bike and brought it in through the french windows, careful to avoid making any sort of slithering noise. Keith's body could be rolled comparatively easily into it. Then Teddy got a purchase on the top of the bag and heaved and hauled it over the rim of the Edsel's boot. Once bag and body were inside it occurred to him that it would be a hygienic and perhaps wise measure to seal it as best he could. Was there any adhesive tape in the house? He didn't think so. Then he remembered Keith's bag of tools, his plumber's equipment. Inside it he found a roll of heavy black tape. He had no idea what it might be used for, possibly for binding round the joints in pipes, but it would suit his purpose. He drew together the open end of the bag and bound it round and round, twenty times round, with the black tape. It was done. He had made no noise while carrying out this disposal of Keith's body and now he closed the boot lid quietly and locked it. Somewhere, in the distance, the sound borne on the crisp, icy air, a clock struck two. He had lived in that house all the twentyone years of his life and never heard that clock before. Perhaps his awareness had never been so great nor his senses so sharpened. He went inside and closed the french windows.

Chapter 13

He had a bath. It was the first thing he did after what he had done. If he had gone straight to bed after handling Keith's body he couldn't have slept. As it was, he woke and sat up some time in the small hours, long before it was light, and still half asleep, still in a dream he had forgotten was happening, saw the sideboard up against the wall in the shadows, its finials and sugarstick columns and clouded glass and gargoyle-like carvings. He saw it as a building, as the sinister mansion of his childhood imaginings, its crenellations as towers, its finials as spires and its green glass as windows, but quivering there in the gloom. And he shouted out in horror before full wakefulness and sanity returned and nothing could any longer be seen in the deep darkness. The sideboard was gone and the room empty of all but his bed and his tools and his table. Memory came back then and what he had done to Keith. The body lay no more than five or six feet from his pillow, albeit enclosed in thick plastic and binding tape and in the metal casket of the Edsel's boot. He couldn't see it, he could see nothing. Had he done that, had he really done that? He thought of getting up and going to look in the front room, then in Keith's bedroom. Instead he stood at the window, staring at a lamp in a side-street, a lamp which shed no light as far away as this beyond a distant glow. The garden, the carport, the fences, were a dense darkness, the sky a dark reddish-brown. He realised suddenly how cold he was, he was shivering, and he went back to bed, huddling the blankets and the quilt tightly round him. Next day was Saturday. He had thought he wouldn't sleep, but he slept late, awakened by the bright sunlight of a clear blue-skied winter's noon. Or perhaps by the phone. He went to answer it, wondering what he would do if it were the police, alerted by the yuppies next door. But it was someone for Keith, a woman who couldn't turn off her hot tap and who wanted a plumber urgently. 'Mr Brex has retired,' Teddy said. It was true in a way. 'Retired?' 'That's right. We all come to it in the end, even workaholics like Mr Brex.' He was - incredibly after last night - enjoying this. 'He's gone to live in a cottage in Liphook.' Not surprisingly, the customer wasn t interested. 'Well, can you come?' 'Afraid not,' said Teddy. 'I'm a craftsman. I suggest you consult the Yellow Pages.' After he put the phone down he started laughing. He felt immeasurably, incredibly, better than he had done at that small-hours waking. The story would do for everyone who phoned for Keith. Was there such a place as Liphook? He didn't really know, the name had come to him out of the air, but he had better find out. Almost immediately the phone rang again, and again he gave his version of Keith's departure from plumbing and from north London. There was going to be a lot of this. Old customers and potential clients would probably call round, too. But there was no chance of anyone guessing what had happened to Keith or where he was now. Troubles lay ahead, he could see that. For instance, could he leave the body there indefinitely? Could he take over the house and go on living in it as if it were his? Perhaps it was his now. And where was the money to come from to pay for everything? In Keith's bedroom he found a dog-eared, much-thumbed map of the British Isles. Keith must have used it when he went on those car rallies. He looked for Liphook and finally spotted it in Sussex not far from Midhurst. Fortuitously, he had found quite a suitable place for Keith to have retired to. He imagined the squat little bungalow with pantiled roof or even one of those cottages that had started life as railway carriages. Knowing Keith, the latter would be his choice. It would stand on a raft of concrete bordered by walls of breeze blocks with a garage of corrugated asbestos for the Edsel... Only the Edsel was here, with Keith inside it. Teddy abandoned fantasies and began on the room. He tore all the Post-its off the window-panes and the tallboy. He filled three plastic bags with Keith's clothes, two with his empty bottles and cans and three more with his car magazines and cigarette cartons. The six pairs of boots went into a cardboard crate which had held the magazines. Not until the room was empty of all but Keith's newly stripped bed, tallboy and single chair, and the bags and box were out on the doorstep to await Monday morning's refuse collection, did he turn his attention to the money he had taken off Keith's body. He counted it. Five hundred and sixty-five pounds. His hands were shaking again. He clenched his fists and breathed deeply until the shaking stopped. Some of that money he would spend on advertising, on offering his services as a joiner and cabinet-maker. He had no idea how to do it, but he could learn. The tail of the Edsel with its flaring fins seemed closer to his windows than it had done in the past. It occurred to him then that he would have to learn to drive. Money would have to be spent on driving lessons. Some time, and not too far distantly, he must be able to drive this car away. He dreamed again that night, but not of the sideboard-turned-mansion this time. This dream was of the thing occupying the Edsel's boot six feet away from his sleeping brain, of its gradual metamorphosis over the weeks and months into a waxen effigy, a skeleton, a bag of dust; until, having driven the monstrous paleellow car out of London and through Surrey and Sussex in the direction of Liphook, he parked and opened the boot and found inside the bags a tiny shrivelled thing like a dried-up insect, which he picked up between forefinger and thumb and threw into the ditch. By the middle of February Teddy had begun work on the mirror. He had decided on sycamore rather than walnut because the colour and the grain were so beautiful, its pattern like multitudinous strands of wavy blonde hair. He worked meticulously and quite slowly, cutting the triangles for his inlay accurately to a fraction of a millimetre, aiming at perfection. And he worked in peace and quiet and fresh air. The smell of smoke had disappeared from everywhere but the front room. Keith's tallboy he had brought down here, sanded down the greasy cigarette-burned surface and, having lightly stained the mahogany, french-polished it. When he had filled more bags and boxes for the refuse collection, this time from his parents' bedroom, he went down the road to the newsagent's. The glass case beside the door contained no advertisements of the kind he was looking for, so he bought two newspapers the newsagent recommended, the Ham and High and the Neasden Times. The Ham and High had what he wanted. The 'Services~ section of the small ads was divided into specific sections: Building and Decorating, Chimney Sweeps, Gardening and Landscaping, Health and Beauty. Under Household Clearance a company offered 'Large, small clearances, clothes, oddments, anything, good prices paid'. 'Rubbish disposal' was also on offer, but no mention was made of payment - except from the customer. In the next column a driving school offered lessons for 'competitive fees' with 'rapid test passing' guaranteed. 'Rapid', Teddy thought, could mean anything, six weeks or two years. But he called the house clearance number and the driving school number in the hope that money received from one would pay for the other. Next he came to some unexpected services. 'Articles for sale' occupied a lot of space and so did 'Massage'. Carpenters were on offer in plenty, he counted twelve advertisements. Shelving systems and wardrobes were what they offered, as well as fitting kitchens and replacing doors. Someone calling himself a cabinet-maker specialised in desks and one ad was from a pair of women joiners. Teddy couldn't see the advantage of having a woman build one s cupboards and the ad made him feel obscurely uneasy. But the rest cheered him up. People obviously did do this and must make a living at it or they wouldn't go on advertising, would they? He was sure he could do a better job than most of them. Time enough to compose his own advertisement when the mirror was finished. Perhaps in May. Maybe he would describe himself as an expert, as one of these joiners did, and put in the qualification he would have by that time. Would he also put 'friendly and reliable service'? In his case, 'thorough and dependable' might be better. Meanwhile, he had enough money to get by on. He folded the Ham and High carefully and put it in the top drawer of the refurbished tallboy. 'Max and Mex House Clearances' took away the main bedroom furniture and gave him fifty pounds for it. He had expected at least a hundred and he protested, but the house clearers said it wouldn't fetch that and what about their profit? They quoted the Ham and High and said they weren't really in the business of rubbish disposal. To have rid himself of the front-room furniture would have been risky, for his gTandmother still came round, if rarely. Probably the last time had been before Christmas. It was as well he had kept it, for she turned up the day after 'Max and Mex' had been. Without much interest in the thought processes of others and having none in their emotions, he had never asked himself how Agnes Tawton must have reacted to surviving a husband, an only daughter and her son-in-law; to having no one in the world but him. After all, he had no one but her. He didn't ask now, only felt a vague disquiet as she surveyed the clean and tidy front room, the neat, scrubbed kitchen. 'Keith's been busy,' she said. It was the only solution she could conceive of, that Keith, having been made uncomfortable by the disorder all these years, had tidied up once his brother and sister-in-law were gone. She trotted through the rooms, looking curiously about her. An armchair seat cushion was lifted up and its interior scrutinised for cigarette ash and dirty tissues. She ran a twisted arthritic finger along the lintel of the back door, seemed nonplussed that her hand came away clean. 'I reckon he'll put you out now,' she said. 'He's got the right. This house was never your dad's. I don't suppose you knew that.' 'Sorry to disappoint you, but as a matter of fact I did.' 'I don't know what you mean, disappoint. It's nothing to do with me. 'Shame,' said Teddy. 'I was counting on finding a corner for myself under your roof.' Agnes's reply was lost in the shrill pealing of the doorbell. Teddy had been anticipating the arrival of the driving instructor for the past ten minutes. He opened the door and let the man in. Now to get rid of Agnes. She had made her way into his room and was standing at the french windows, looking out. Teddy had only ever had one children's book, a collection of anthropomorphic animal stories and she had given it to him. He thought she looked like an illustration from that book, a toad in hat and coat, for instance, or a housewife mole. She turned round, asked him if he was going to introduce her and, when he didn't, held out her hand and said, 'I'm Mrs Tawton, I'm his grandma.' 'Pleased to meet you,' said the driving instructor. 'Call me Damon.' Then he saw the Edsel. 'That belong to you?' he said to Teddy. 'It's his uncle's,' said Agnes. 'D'you mind if I go out and take a closer look?' Teddy minded very much, but he could hardly say so. They all went outside by way of the back door, Agnes, though about half a century Damon's senior, tripping along faster than he. The March day was no warmer than January had been. An icy wind struck their faces and Agnes was obliged to keep a grip on her sugarloaf-shaped red hat. 'Keith not on his bike then,' she said. It was one of those remarks that, though merely pointing out what must be obvious to all, seem loaded with menace. Teddy felt the bike as a threat to himself. If Keith had gone to work, as his grandmother must believe, the bike would be with him. If he had retired, as all his erstwhile customers believed, the bike would be with him or have been sold; it would certainly not be in this garden. But Agnes answered her own speculations. 'Too cold for him,' she said and, with an edge of spite, 'He's past tearing about on them things at his age.' Teddy wondered if learning to drive a car also taught you to drive a motor bike. He didn't feel he could ask. Damon was gazing with adoration at the Edsel and had moved too close to it for Teddy's comfort. He had actually laid one hand on the boot lid. 'That is a beauty. That is a vehicle as would do a ton and twenty when it was new,' he said. 'Maybe would today, the little darling. You can see it's been kept in lovely condition.' It was as if he were talking about a horse, Teddy thought. 'Mind you, with its fuel consumption in the low teens, it's not for everyone.' 'A poor man's car, would you say?' said Teddy. 'Come again?' 'Owning it would keep you poor.' 'Oh, yes. Very good. You got it.' Was there a smell? No, there was nothing. It had been very cold and must be as icy as a fridge inside there. He thought he saw Agnes's nose twitching like a rabbit's. He said, 'Shall we get going, then?' Damon offered Agnes a lift home. She declined it. She wasn't going in any car driven by her grandson, she said, not when he'd never been at the wheel before. It didn't do to have your bones broken at her age. Teddy got into the driving-school car and when Damon had finished telling him about switching on the ignition and moving the gear shift from neutral into first, he asked if getting his licence would also entitle him to ride a motor bike. Damon said no it wouldn't, no group D types, whatever that meant, and began enumerating all the varieties of vehicle Teddy would be able to drive, including invalid carriages and heavy goods vehicles up to a certain tounage. Teddy turned on the ignition, let in the clutch and stalled the engine. By the middle of April he had finished the mirror and submitted it. He was in love with it, it was so beautiful and so flawless, as he tended to fall in love with objects, ornaments, pictures, Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place, for instance, and the diamond ring. After he had packed it with the greatest care in bubble wrap and polystyrene - another of his bugbears among plastics but essential here - it was a wrench to let it go. After it had been exhibited at the Eastcote College degree show, would he ever be able to bring himself to sell it? To part with it? He willingly sold Keith's motor bike. A friend of the yuppies came round one day, said he had seen the old Enfield from a window next door and Megsie said the man that owned it had retired and moved away, and the bike might be for sale. 'Megsie?' 'Next door,' said the friend, surprised. 'Megsie and Nige. You know.' He hadn't, but he did now. How did they know? How did this Megsie know? Somehow or other the news must have filtered through from one of Keith's customers to whom he had told this story. Luckily, he had kept the registration certificate for