Things got a little trickier then. I had to stay close enough to avoid losing sight of him, but I couldn’t get
too
close because the streets around here were fairly empty. If he happened to stop and turn around, he was bound to see me. Whether he’d recognize me or not was another matter.
Probably not,
I thought. But with a man like Iggy,
probably not
wasn’t much comfort. So I hung back a bit, watching from the cover of roadside trees, parked cars, pillar-boxes, whatever I could find.
Most of the houses around here were three—or four-story terraced buildings with curtained bay windows and peeling paintwork and rows of handwritten nameplates next to a communal doorbell on the porch wall. Flats and studios, I guessed.
Victorian houses?
Maybe…
They looked vaguely familiar, and I wondered if I’d already been this way when I was trailing around in circles earlier on. Possibly…probably…it was hard to tell. The streetlights were on now. Darkness was coming down fast. Things look different in the dark: flatter, colder, more sinister.
Iggy had stopped.
Halfway along a cramped little terrace, shadowed in the sodium glow of a street lamp, his long black coat reflecting the stark orange light. He wasn’t doing anything. Just standing there, outside a tall white house, gazing up at the softly lit windows.
I was about thirty meters away, on a tree-lined street that branched off the terrace at a right angle. There was a small stretch of park to my left, which gave me a perfect view of Iggy and the tall white house. I studied the house. It was the same as all the other houses in the street: terraced, three stories high, flat-fronted, with stone steps leading up to an unlit porchway. Iggy was climbing the steps now…pulling out a key…unlocking the door…glancing over his shoulder…
He entered the house.
Now what?
I asked myself.
What do you do now? Stay here? Move? Get closer?
How was I supposed to know? I’d never done anything like this before. It was dark. I was cold…shivering…sweating…hungry…empty…
Thoughtless.
Just then, a car rolled down the street. Its headlights
swept the plane trees, lighting up their paled trunks, the park railings, me. I froze. I saw my shadow looming across the pavement—a hunched black figure with a lengthened head, creeping out from behind the trees…
Not good,
I thought.
The car slowed for a moment…the engine idling…and then it moved off again, taking my shadow with it.
You can’t stay here,
I told myself, breathing a sigh of relief.
Lurking around in the trees…you’ll get arrested.
I waited until the car had turned the corner at the end of the road, then I moved out from behind the tree and started walking. Down the street, left into the terrace, along the pavement on the park side of the road, keeping in close to the railings. The white house was on the opposite side of the street. As I approached it, I kept my eyes to the ground, not daring to look. I wanted to look…God, I wanted to look. But if Iggy were to come out now…
I forced myself not to imagine it.
A few seconds later I came to a wrought-iron gate in the railings. The gate was open, leading into the little park. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d stepped through the gate and was following a little pathway around to the right, pausing at a wooden bench, taking a quick look around, then moving off the pathway and edging my way into a shoulder-high thicket of bushes and shrubs that bordered the park.
I could smell the earth—damp and dark.
Litter.
Leaves.
Sap.
Thorns.
Then I was facing the railings again. Looking through the iron bars at the terrace, the white house…the windows, the steps, the front door. There was no sign of any movement. I stepped back into the shadows and positioned myself behind a bush, then settled down to wait.
Nothing much happened for a while. The street moved quietly to the early-evening sounds of cars and people passing by, but none of them stopped. They were all going somewhere else. Home, probably…or out for the night…just cruising around…looking for fun. No one went into the white house, and no one came out. The curtains stayed shut.
The windows, I noticed, had metal bars on the front. This bothered me for a while—
why does a house need bars on the windows?
—but then I realized that all the other houses had barred windows, too, so I guessed it didn’t mean anything. The houses around here had barred windows, that was all. It didn’t
mean
anything. But as I crouched there, hiding in the bushes, watching the house, I found myself curiously drawn to these black barred windows. I couldn’t stop staring at them. Studying them, concentrating on the regularity of the bars, the black lines, the width of the gaps, the background whiteness of the curtains…and after a while the lines began forming themselves into a perfectly focused grid, black on white, black on white, black on white…and I started having really weird thoughts. I imagined the chaos of the last few days distilling itself into clearly defined elements, each embedded in its own neatly outlined rectangle. One, two, three, four, five, six…six perfect rectangles. And inside
the rectangles were symbols…elements…nameless shapes of things I didn’t understand—shadows, shades, abstractions, forms—flickering colors on a pure white background.
None of it meant anything to me.
It was just there.
And then the front door opened and Iggy came out, and suddenly the bars were just bars again. The curtains were just curtains. And Iggy was leaving the house and walking away up the street.
I gave it a good five minutes before I made a move. I wanted to make sure that Iggy wasn’t coming back. I also wanted to give myself time to clear all the crap out of my head. The weird stuff—the bars, the symbols, the elements…whatever it was. I didn’t need it. And, to tell you the truth, it scared me a bit. So I just stayed where I was, breathing in the cold night air, soaking up the woody scent of the bushes, emptying my mind…until I was fairly sure I was back on planet Earth again.
Then I stood up…
And squatted back down again.
How was I going to get in the house?
I couldn’t just ring the bell, could I? I didn’t know who was in there. I was
hoping
that Candy was in there, but I couldn’t be sure. Some of Iggy’s crew could be in there. It could be
his
house. It could be empty…
God.
I wished I knew what I was
doing.
But I didn’t.
And what’s the best thing to do when you don’t know
what to do? Nothing. Just wait. Give it time. See what happens.
So that’s what I did.
I waited.
I gave it time.
And, after a while, I saw what happened.
A black woman approached the house. She was big and bulky, dressed in a lumpy beige coat, and she was carrying a full bag in each hand. The bags looked heavy. Sainsbury’s bags, full of shopping. She stopped outside the house for a moment and rested the bags on the pavement, then she picked them up again and started struggling up the steps, taking them one at a time.
I moved out of the bushes, ran along the pathway, then slowed to a walk as I passed through the gate and started across the road. The woman was at the top of the steps now. She’d put down the shopping bags and was ringing the bell and leaning toward the intercom. My heart was racing as I approached the house, but I forced myself to smile…skipping up the steps as the front door swung open and the woman bent down to pick up the bags…
I stepped up, still smiling, and said, “Here, let me get those for you.” Before she could say anything, I’d picked up the bags and was holding the door open for her. “After you,” I said, all bright and breezy. She gave me a funny little look, then shrugged and went inside. I stepped in after her, looking around, taking it all in: the murky corridor, the hall table piled with junk mail, the stained linoleum floor, the steep flight of stairs on my right, the smell of stale air…
“Where do you want them?” I asked the woman, indicating the bags.
“Just here,” she said.
I put the bags on the floor. She looked at me again, then picked them up and headed off down the corridor, leaving me standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up into the unknown, my insides pounding like a thousand drums.
T
he house felt empty as I climbed the stairs. I knew it
wasn’t
—I could hear the woman who’d let me in rattling drawers somewhere below, and from somewhere above I could hear the faint sound of a radio playing behind closed doors—but everything still
felt
empty. The dark stairs, the colorless walls, the threadbare carpet beneath my feet…there was nothing to it. No life, no soul. No comfort. This wasn’t a home, it was just a place.
I moved cautiously, pausing after every step, keeping still, looking up, listening hard…then another step…another pause…another step…another pause. It was slow going, but I didn’t want to take any chances. A dim light was shining from the second or third floor, and I could still hear the sound of the radio…
There were people here.
Somewhere.
I went on up to the first floor and paused on the landing. A long corridor stretched out to my right. It was
similar to the hallway downstairs, only this one had doors—six doors, three on each side. They were all closed. In the airless silence I could hear cars passing on the street outside. Headlights swept across a curtained window at the end of the corridor, briefly illuminating the scuffed old walls, then the lights passed by and the corridor sank back into its semidarkness. I breathed in, trying to calm myself. The air up here smelled different from the air downstairs. It smelled almost clean, but not quite—a sort of air-freshenery cleanness. The kind of smell that’s supposed to remove the bad smells but doesn’t—it just hides them.
Pots rattled downstairs—the black woman…
I moved on.
Up the stairs to the second floor…or was it the
first
floor? I wasn’t sure. Does the ground floor count as the first floor? Do houses
have
ground floors?
Does it matter?
No, it didn’t. It was just something to think about as I climbed the stairs, something to keep my mind off the grubbiness and the emptiness and the overwhelming stink of fear that pervaded the house and everything in it, including me…
There was bad stuff going on in here.
Bad stuff, bad people…
I reached the second-floor landing—another long corridor, another curtained window, another six doors. Same as before. Nothing happening. No life, no joy. I turned away…and was just about to move on again, when I heard the sound of a door opening. I turned back. Halfway along the hallway, a girl in a white bathrobe was coming out of a room. Olive-skinned, barefoot, dark-haired, pretty. She stopped at the sight of me.
I smiled at her.
She didn’t smile back. She didn’t do anything. Her eyes were vacant. Her mouth was closed, without expression…as if it had been closed forever.
“Excuse me…” I said.
She just stared at me.
I cleared my throat. “I was looking for someone…”
She blinked once, shook her head, then closed the door and walked off down the hallway. I watched her as she opened a door and went into what I guessed was a bathroom. The door closed. Taps started running.
I stood there for a moment, feeling strangely unmoved, then kept on up the stairs.
The third floor was just as dull as the others—dull hallway, dull doors, dull walls, dull window—but it wasn’t quite so lifeless. There was a light, for one thing—a pale white light in a cobwebbed paper shade, hanging from the ceiling. And the music was louder, too. The radio music…it seemed to be coming from the first room on the right.
Music, lights…it wasn’t much, but at least it gave the impression of
some
kind of life.
There were no more stairs now. Nowhere else to go. This was the third floor…These were third-floor flats. I didn’t know if the house was Victorian. It certainly wasn’t refurbished, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.
I was here now…
I was here.
I might as well keep going.
I walked down the hallway and stopped outside the room where the music was coming from. It was still muffled, but it sounded pretty good—some kind of Asian hip-hop stuff…twangy guitars, off-beat drums, nice
singing. I listened to it for a while, then took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and knocked on the door.
The girl who answered didn’t look well. She had a thin angular face, pale puffy skin, and yellowed eyes. Her hair was shapeless—short, black, harsh—and her clothes were cheap.
She said nothing, just looked at me through a two-inch gap in the doorway.
“I’m looking for Candy,” I told her.
She didn’t answer, just glanced over my shoulder. I turned around to see what she was looking at, but there was nothing there. I turned back to the girl.
“Candy,” I repeated. “Does she live here?”
“Who’re you?” she said. Her voice was quiet, clipped, with a foreign accent. I couldn’t tell what it was—Russian, maybe…East European…
“My name’s Joe,” I told her. “I’m a friend of Candy’s…We met up a couple of times. Is she here?”
The girl opened the door a little wider. “Friend?”
I nodded.
“Boyfriend?”
“Well…” I said, “I don’t know…not really. I just—”
“Kanagaroo?”
“What?”
“Zoo?”
“Oh, yeah…the
zoo
…yeah, that’s right…we went to the zoo. Candy showed me the kangaroo. Did she tell you—”
“There,” the girl said, pointing along the hallway at the last door on the left. “She hurts.”
“Hurts?”
The girl shrugged. “You shouldn’t come here.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged again, then stepped back and quietly closed the door in my face. I thought about knocking again or even calling out to her, but there didn’t seem much point. She’d told me all I needed to know.
And more.
Imagine: You’ve spent all day traipsing around London, lost in a maze of chaos, trying to find a hidden illusion; you’ve been living on hope, ignoring reality, fueled only by feelings you don’t understand. You’ve been looking for a dream, never truly believing you’d find it, but now—incredibly—you have. It’s right there in front of you—just behind that off-white door. It’s there…
She’s there.
Behind the door.
Imagine that.
Candy’s
in
there…
All you have to do is raise your hand and knock…
That’s all.
Just raise your hand…
I couldn’t do it. My arm wouldn’t move. It was dead, senseless…unresponsive. It belonged to someone else. For a minute or two, all I could do was stand there in front of the door, staring at the flaking paint, the grimy panels, the ill-fitting lock…my hands hanging down at my sides…my head throbbing…my body burning…hot…cold…inside out…sick with too many things. Excitement. Fear. Anxiety. Pain. Passion. Hope.
Everything.
Nothing.
“Candy?” I whispered.
Too quiet.
I tried again. “Candy?”
It was still too quiet, but somehow the sound of my voice brought my arm back to life and I reached up and knocked on the door.
“Candy?” I called out. “Are you in there? It’s Joe…”
There was no reply. I put my ear to the door and listened. Nothing at first…then something…a faint rustling…a creak…a single footstep. Then silence again. I knocked once more.
“Candy…please…open the door.”
This time I definitely heard her. Light footsteps, moving slowly toward me, toward the door. I stepped back—I don’t know why…It just seemed the natural thing to do. I stepped back and put my hands in my pockets. Again, I don’t know
why
I put my hands in my pockets. I just did.
The door opened…
And there she was—the imagined face in all its reality: pale, pained, bruised, and beaten. One of her eyes was blackened and her left wrist was swollen and bandaged.
“Candy,” I breathed. “What happened—”
“I can’t talk to you,” she said weakly. “You have to go…”
“I’m not going anywhere. Look at you…your face…”
“It’s nothing,” she said, brushing at the ugly swelling around her eye. “I’m all right. Please, Joe…just go…leave me alone. You’ll only make things worse.”
“I won’t.”
“You will…believe me.”
I shook my head. “I’m not going anywhere until you talk to me.”
“I
can’t…
”
I didn’t reply. I just stood there, staring into her eyes,
letting her see my determination. I wasn’t leaving. She could shut the door if she wanted to. She could lock it, bolt it, nail it shut…She could do whatever she liked. But I still wasn’t going anywhere.
She looked back at me, nervously chewing her lip.
I said, “The sooner you let me in, the sooner I’ll be gone.”
She closed her eyes for a moment—her face darkened with sadness—then, without looking at me, she stepped back and opened the door.
It wasn’t a flat, it was just a room. And it wasn’t even much of a room. There was a double bed, a wardrobe, a mirrored dressing table, a few shelves, one or two books…a cheap CD player on the floor…clothes and towels piled all over the place. There was a beaded doorway in the far wall that led into a small bathroom, but I couldn’t see a kitchen anywhere, nor any kitchen equipment—no food, no fridge, no cooker. No television. No ornaments, no pictures…
Nothing for living.
It was just somewhere to exist.
I blinked and rubbed my eyes, squinting into the light. The curtains were closed and the room was lit with a dim red glow from a heavy cylindrical lamp on the floor.
“Don’t say anything,” Candy said, sitting down gingerly on the bed. “Please…just don’t say anything.”
The bed was a mess—tangled sheets, scrunched-up pillows, a bedside cabinet strewn with all kinds of debris. I went over to the dressing table and sat down on a hard-backed chair. The surface of the dressing table was covered with bottles and tubs and jars and tubes…bits of
foil…plastic wrap…matches…cigarette lighters…packs of painkillers…
“I couldn’t tell you,” Candy said.
I turned around and looked at her. She was sitting cross-legged, leaning slightly to one side, resting her hand on her hip…as if trying to relieve a pain. Her hair was loose and she was wearing a long white nightgown. The gown looked old—ivory white, thin and lacy…thin enough to see that she wasn’t wearing anything else. The outline of her body whispered under the cloth.
I lowered my eyes.
She said, “I
wanted
to tell you…honestly…”
“Tell me what?” I said.
“Come
on,
Joe—what do you think? All this…” She waved her hand around the room. “What I am…what I do…”
I raised my eyes and looked at her. “Why did he beat you up? Was it because of me?”
She shrugged. “You…me…it doesn’t really matter. I know the rules—I’ve only got myself to blame.” She reached over to the bedside cabinet, wincing slightly, and rummaged through the mess. She found a cigarette and lit it. “He doesn’t usually go this far,” she said, grinning through the cigarette smoke. “I think he just got carried away.”
“
Carried away?
” I said incredulously. “Look what he’s
done
to you…How can you let him
do
something like that?”
“
Let
him?” she said, shaking her head. “God, you really don’t get it, do you? You really don’t know what it’s like.”
“So tell me.”
“Why? What difference will it make?” She flicked
cigarette ash into an empty Coke can, then lifted her eyes and looked right into me. “I’m a whore, Joe. I go with men for money. I give the money to Iggy. He gives me drugs. That’s all there is to it.”
“And that’s what you want, is it?”
“That’s how it is. What I
want
doesn’t come into it.”
“What
do
you want?”
She stared at me, her eyes pooled with tears. “I want you to go. Get out of here. Go home. Don’t get involved, Joe…please…just go. You can’t do anything…”
She was crying now.
I went over and sat down next to her on the bed. She sniffed and wiped her nose. I took the cigarette from her hand, dropped it in the Coke can, then put my arm around her shoulders.
“Please…” she snuffled, “it’s not worth it…”
“Yes, it is,” I said, drawing her close.
She rested her head on my shoulder. I could feel the wetness of her tears on my neck.
“He’ll kill you,” she said quietly.
I looked into her eyes and smiled. “He’ll have to catch me first.”
She didn’t smile back. She just looked at me for a moment, her tears still flowing, then she breathed out softly and kissed me.
The touch of her body.
The heat of her breath.
Her comfort.
My wonder.
The world in our eyes.
It was more than enough for both of us.
We talked then—both of us lying on our backs, on the bed, staring up at the ceiling…just talking. It felt OK. Nice and simple. Like two little kids, lying in the grass, staring up at the ever-blue sky…nothing to worry about…nothing to fear…
“Where’s Iggy gone?” I asked her.
“Out.”
“Is he coming back?”
“You wouldn’t be here if he was. How did you find me, anyway?”
“Very nice, thanks,” I replied.
“I didn’t mean that.”
“I know.”
I told her how I’d walked around King’s Cross, hoping to find her, how I’d eventually spotted Iggy and followed him, then waited in the park and tricked my way inside by helping the black woman with her bags.
“That’s Bamma,” Candy said.
“What?”
“Bamma—the woman with the bags. She’s called Bamma. She does the cleaning and shopping and stuff. She’s all right. She won’t say anything.”
Shadows drifted on the ceiling above me—streetlight shadows, window shadows, the shadowed lines of metal bars—and I remembered all the weird stuff I’d thought about earlier when I was staring at the bars from outside: the chaos, the colors, the nameless shapes…
I didn’t want to think about it.
“How’s your wrist?” I asked Candy. “Is it broken?”
“No, just sprained, I think.” She cautiously flexed her fingers. “It’s all right…”
“What about the rest of it?”
“Rest of what?”
I sat up and moved my hand toward her hips, where—through the sheerness of her nightgown—I could see her bruised and battered skin. The bruises looked like thunderclouds—blue-black, purple, mustard yellow.