*
Carefully, Albert attaches the Spookee sticker to his wall. He has all eight of the Spookee stickers now, collected from Mrs Biddle’s cornflakes’ packets. He stands back a foot or two to inspect the arrangement, his empty eyes engaged in turn with each of the grey, watery creatures, one with a red tongue lolling out, another gnashing devilish teeth. He moves further away, surveying the stickers from the door in order to see what the decoration looks like just in case Mrs Biddle ever glances in, not that she can manage the stairs, but you never know.
Albert looks after Mrs Biddle in return for this room. Years ago, when he and Pettie ran away from the Morning Star, they slept rough, at first in an abandoned seed nursery and after that in cars if they could get into them, or in sheds left unlocked on the allotments that stretched for half a mile behind a depository for wrecked buses. In time Albert heard about the night work on the Underground; he slept by day, on benches or in waiting-rooms. Then, because he happened to be passing, he helped a man with elephantiasis to cross a street and the following morning he noticed the
man again and helped him again, this time carrying for him a pair of trousers he was taking to a dry cleaner’s.
Albert waited on the pavement outside the cleaner’s and when the man emerged he fell into step with him. He felt compassion for the man’s suffering – the great bloated body, the moisture of sweat on his forehead and his cheeks, the difficulty he experienced in gripping with his fingers. Albert did not say this but simply walked beside the man, restraining his own natural motion so that it matched the slow drag of the man’s. They did not speak much because speech was difficult for the man while he was engaged in the effort of movement, but when they reached a small supermarket – the Late-and-Early KP Minimarket – he thanked Albert for his assistance and his company, and turned to enter the place. He had time to spare, Albert said, and followed him in.
He carried the wire basket around the shelves, filling it as he was directed. The man rested, leaning against the shelves where tins of soup and vegetables were stacked, calling out to Albert the remaining items on his list. A family of Indians ran the minimarket, two young men and their parents, the mother at the till. When the shopping was complete and paid for, Albert took the carrier-bags that contained it and the man did not demur, although when they were on the street again he might have been left standing there. Later, when he and Albert knew one another better, the man mentioned that. It would not have been an unusual occurrence nowadays for a young person to befriend an afflicted man in order to steal from him when the moment was ripe. ‘But though I look no more than sawdust in a skin,’ the man with elephantiasis stated, ‘I can spot an honest face.’
On the morning of the shopping expedition he had led the way to his council accommodation and had invited Albert in when they reached it. He was tired, resting again while Albert, at his instruction, buttered cream crackers and prepared two cups of Bovril. He noticed that the man was not in the habit of washing the dishes he ate from and so, every morning after this one, Albert called in to attend to the chore, to make the Bovril and at one o’clock to open a tin of beans, which they shared on toast, with a banana afterwards. Still unable to afford a place to sleep, his work on the Underground being ill-paid, Albert was grateful for the comfort of the man’s rooms, for the armchair that became the one he always sat in, for the warmth and the food. But this convenience was not his motive. He did not seek to cultivate a relationship for profit: it had come naturally to him to assist the man across the street when he recognized signs of stress. It was natural, too, that he should have accompanied him to the Late-and-Early KP Minimarket and should have carried his purchases. Not much thought, certainly no cunning, inspired these actions.
Elephantiasis
Albert wrote down, having asked the man how he was spelling that. He liked the sound of the word; he liked the look of the letters when he wrote them.
One day, arriving as usual on a morning there was to be a visit to the minimarket, Albert was taken aback when his ringing of the doorbell remained unanswered. A neighbour was attracted by his worry as he stood there, and then another neighbour. Something was wrong, they said, and there was excitement when drama was anticipated. A small crowd gathered, a police car arrived, and already the man who did not open his door was spoken of in the past
tense. Forcible entry was made; inside, the television screen flickered, an American domestic comedy in progress. Slumped low in his outsize armchair, eyes still and glassy, the man Albert had looked after was no longer alive.
Five days later, at the funeral, Albert met Mrs Biddle when she slipped on the crematorium steps, saving herself by sitting down. Albert was one of several mourners who helped her to her feet and it happened that it was his arm she particularly held on to. There was to be a drink or two in the house next door to the dead man’s, since neighbours rather than any family had been his associates for as long as people could remember. ‘You’ll come on in?’ Mrs Biddle invited Albert, and afterwards she asked him to see her safely to where she lived herself, in Appian Terrace, two streets away from the council estate. As he did so, she told him that some days her arthritis was so bad she couldn’t move from her bed. She lived in fear of the social services, she confided, constantly apprehensive that they would poke their noses into her life, counsellors they called themselves.
Mrs Biddle
Albert wrote down afterwards, having learnt that this was her name. He perceived a significance in the fact that she had been at the funeral, as previously he had perceived a significance in the fact that he was passing by when the man with elephantiasis wished to cross the street. He cleaned Mrs Biddies house for her, did her shopping, and was instructed to give the social services a flea in the ear if they arrived on the doorstep. Years ago in the kitchen of the Morning Star home he had learnt how to fry – sausages, bacon, bread, an egg – and something fried was good for her, so Mrs Biddle said. Sometimes, for a change, he brought her a take-away, a curry, chips with a burger, or
chicken from the Kentucky. He made her hot drinks, Oval-tine or Horlicks, Ribena or Marmite or cocoa, whatever she was in the mood for. ‘I come in for a place,’ he passed on to Pettie. ‘There’s an old lady give me a room.’
Mrs Biddle says Albert is as a son to her. She would prefer it if he didn’t go out every night, but he has pointed out that cleaning up the Underground is work that has to be done. He is fortunate to have the work, he explains, a stroke of good fortune come his way.
‘You OK then, Mrs Biddle?’ he inquires after he has stuck up the Spookee stickers. ‘You manage to eat a bit?’
Mrs Biddle has eaten everything. In the sitting-room where she also sleeps she is still in bed, watching television, a game show with numbered boxes. She turns it off because when Albert is there she likes to hear his news.
‘Yeah, I been down the shops,’ he answers when she asks. ‘I paid the gas.’
‘You get the woman with the hair?’
‘Yeah, I got her. Violet she’s called. She has it on her badge.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised what she’s called, that woman.’
Albert says it takes all sorts. He stacks the dishes Mrs Biddle has eaten from, making room on a tray for the metal teapot she has herself carried to her room. For a moment he worries, reminded by the teapot of her picking her steps from the kitchen, shuffling dangerously along, the teapot’s handle wrapped in a cloth where the black plastic binding fell off years ago. A trip and she could be scalded, lying there while he’s out or asleep. But when Mrs Biddle decides to make her own tea she will not be moved from doing so.
‘No hurry on them dishes. Rest in the chair, Albert. Keep me company a bit.’
Even more than hearing Albert’s news Mrs Biddle likes to share with him the memories that keep her going when she’s alone. As Gracie de Lisle, girl assistant to Halriati the Sicilian, and before that as one of the four Singing Cowslips, she has not been unknown. When Mr Biddle married her she was professionally engaged, twice nightly at the Tottenham Grand Empire.
In the small, crowded room – rows of cottages on shelves and in cabinets, camels and elephants and reindeer on the mantelpiece – Albert hears further highlights from the theatres and the halls. The cottages are of china, dully glazed so that a sense of reality is retained; the animals are of a brown material that has been grained to resemble carved wood. Theatrical photographs are displayed in mock-wooden frames on two tables and on the walls.
‘Nineteen forty-eight, the old Hip in Huddersfield.
Puss in Boots
and the lights failed.’
‘What did you do, Mrs Biddle?’ Albert asks, although he knows.
‘Candles we had to resort to, the usherettes’ flashlights, you name it we had it. The day after Boxing Day. Spoilt it for the kiddies, they said.’
Albert never minds hearing a highlight more than once, throwing in the odd response in order to keep company with her because it’s company she’s after. He stayed with her all day the time her front-garden ornaments disappeared, and again when the social services wrote about her pension, saying it could be reduced, and again when they sent a request to know when it was she’d died. Keeping company
is the heart of looking after people, as Albert first experienced in his Morning Star days. ‘Stay by me, Albert,’ they used to say, a catchphrase it became. The time the youths laughed when the man with elephantiasis sat down to rest himself on the edge of the pavement he stayed with him until the youths went away, even though the man said he was used to abuse on the streets.
‘ “Milk that cow!” Aubrey shouted from the stilts, and then the back kicked the bucket away and the front did the little dance that had them in stitches. Harry Sunders was the best back in the business. Clowny took the front, and those two always had strong beer in the cow. A couple of Stingos in their pockets and sometimes they spilt it. Brought the house down when the Stingo dribbled out. They’d be prancing about, not knowing they was leaving little pools.’
‘Yes,’ Albert says. Everything is on the tray now. He tidies the bed, gathering up pages of the local newspaper and a magazine, listening to further tales while he does so. When there’s a pause he says:
‘You know you can be in the Salvation Army without musical knowledge, Mrs Biddle?’
Mrs Biddle sniffs. Peculiar in this day and age, the Salvationists. Grown men and women with their tambourines. Dismissively, she shakes her head. She could do without the Salvationists this morning.
‘You hear of Joseph of Arimathea, Mrs Biddle?’
Mrs Biddle doesn’t know if she has heard of Joseph of Arimathea or not. There was Joseph and Dan Saul, kept a greengrocer’s, Jewish boys. The father was a Joseph, too. The family moved up West, Dan Saul went into jewellery. Flashy he always was.
‘Time of Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea. He took the body. There was another bloke come down out of a tree and carries the Cross. The time the Army was preaching I went up to them and asked the one with the glasses how they’re spelling Arimathea.’
Albert spells it now. Arimathea was a place, he explains, a desert locality, not so much as a bush to shade the ground. No water, nothing. Put seeds down and they wouldn’t grow.
You can’t live without water, Mrs Biddle tetchily agrees, anyone living there should have moved away. Street preachers will tell you anything, Adam and Eve, feed the multitude with a fish. ‘Anything comes into their heads and then they get the tambourines out.’
‘They didn’t have no tambourines the day I asked the man, Mrs Biddle. In their lunch hour it was.’
‘Same difference to me, Albert. All that about a burning bush, all that about a star. They lull you with the music.’
Albert doesn’t protest further. He collects a cup and saucer he hasn’t noticed on the window-ledge. Mrs Biddle says there’s trouble with the Lottery.
‘Some man strung himself up. Win the Lottery and it’s the end of you, the new thing is.’
Albert asks about that, picking up the tray. It could be you have to pay for the uniform. Stands to reason, the Army couldn’t go handing out clothes. Albert understands that, but doesn’t say so now because her attention wanders whenever he mentions the Army – the way it does when he says SAS or Air India has just gone over, or when he tries to tell her about Joey Ells. The time he told her about scratching his initials on the brick under the windowsill at the Morning Star she fell asleep.
‘A couple of thousand you’d get in the Irish Sweep. Enough for anyone.’
‘’Course it is, Mrs Biddle.’
Twice he put his initials there,
A. L
., and the year,
1983
. It was Mrs Hoates who told him his other name was Luffe, something he hadn’t known. She’d chosen Luffe because it suited him, she said. Albert Luffe. She spelt it for him when he asked and he wrote it down.
‘Get us a curry later on, Albert? Something from Ishi Baba’s?’
Albert holds the tray with one hand while he opens the door. No problem about a curry. He’ll have a sleep and then he’ll see what’s on offer.
‘You know what I’d like, Albert?’
‘What’s that then?’
‘You make me a jelly, Albert? You make me a jelly and put it in the ice compartment for tonight?’
He nods, and Mrs Biddle declares that with a jelly to look forward to she’ll get up. She’ll get up and she’ll catch the afternoon sun by the window. Then there’ll maybe be something on the TV. A load of rubbish, that show with the boxes was, the man’s clothes too tight on him.
‘Good for you to get up.’ Albert repeats what a woman in the KP told him when he reported that sometimes he has difficulty persuading Mrs Biddle to leave her bed. Bedsores there could be, apparently. Joints seizing up if you lay there.
‘You got a red jelly at all, Albert?’
‘Yeah, I got one.’
The Morning Star has come into his mind because of
remembering the initials. Miss Rapp in the mornings with ‘O Kind Creator’, her fingers dashing along the piano keys. Mrs Cavey on her hands and knees in the bootroom, red polish on a hairbrush. Plaster falls from the stairway wall, the smell of boiling cabbage creeps upstairs. The cars come on a Sunday, the coats hang on the hallstand, big heavy coats worn to Rotary and to church, dark hats on the curved pegs, the uncles’ gloves on the shelf below the mirror. Johneen Bale was given a dress and socks an uncle’s children had grown out of, Leeroy a bottle-opener, the mongol girl a bangle she sold to Ange, Ahzar and Little Mister frisbees. Cakes and jamrolls there were, beads and rings and plastic puzzles: he found the places to hide when they didn’t want to take the presents any more. ‘Don’t bother me now, boy,’ Mr Hoates said every time he tried to tell, Mr Hoates gone sleepy, his hour of Sunday rest, his gas fire hissing. Mrs Cavey said wash your mouth out. ‘Stay by me, Albert,’Joey Ells begged, but he couldn’t that time and she hid in the rainwater tank, crawling under the strands of barbed wire, making a gap in the planks that covered the manhole. ‘Who’s seen Joey Ells?’ Mr Hoates asked at Sunday tea and someone said there was snow on the ground, there’d be her footprints. ‘Shine your torch down, Albert,’ Mr Hoates said, and she was there with her legs broken. Mrs Hoates went visiting on a Sunday afternoon, when the uncles came. ‘Now, what d’you want to do that for?’ she said to Joey Ells when she returned. ‘Frightening the life out of us.’