Enchantment (10 page)

Harold, then. H. V. Trotman? Now there was someone who might have a bit of cash to spare in a good cause. He had a house and a car, and he must get decent pay as Superhod, whatever he said about the brickies. Tim rehearsed how he could possibly ask. Would Harold be angry with Tim? They were friends in a way. ‘You're all right,' he had said, but would money destroy the friendship?

When Tim could not make a decision, he would sometimes consult the oracle. You opened the English dictionary at random, shut your eyes and stabbed a pencil at it.

Tim opened the dictionary somewhere under
h
, screwed up his eyes and let his pencil drop.

‘Gimme a yes or no.'

The word was ‘hamstring'. There you are – a direct sign from the oracle. Hamstringing would be in Harold's repertoire for the royal family and other ill-favoured persons.

He rang the garage. ‘I'm OK on the deposit,' he told the man. The oracle cannot lie.

‘You going to fetch it in?'

‘I'll put it in the post. Will you order the gearbox?'

‘When we get the cash,' the man said patiently.

Tim rang Harold several times before he got an answer. ‘I've been trying to reach you for two days,' he said.

‘Well, I've been here. Too wet to work.'

‘Don't you answer the phone, then?'

‘Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.'

‘I was wondering … well, I've not seen you for some time.'

Harold said nothing.

‘I see you've been on the rampage. Black Monk, I mean.'

Heavy breathing showed that Harold was still there, at least.

‘I gained a lot on the last grid, though. I was wondering – what about if I come round Sunday?'

‘OK,' Harold said, gravelly as an old gangster movie.

Harold lived in an ancient market town gone high tech, at ‘Marbella', Brentwood Close, a goodish walk from the bus station, on a new estate that ended in doomed green fields.

‘Marbella', a semi on the circle at the end of the close, had an apricot front door guarded by gnomes, and window boxes and flowered curtains. Only the gnomes looked like Harold. He must have a woman there.

He did. As Tim went up the path, under the stares of two rude small boys in the garden on one side and a baby in a pram on the other, the apricot door opened, and an ochre-skinned woman came out in tight black jeans, with murderous sharp boots and hair fuzzed out like wood shavings.

‘Hullo.' Tim smiled.

‘Hullo.' She did not smile. Her mouth was painted on violet, in a heart shape.

‘Harold in?' Tim knew he was. The white Escort was there, with the troll on a string in the back window, but he had to say something.

‘Who are you?'

‘His – I'm a – like, a friend.'

‘Help yourself,' she said and went past him to the road, where she got into a red car parked behind Harold's. The tight black legwear made her bottom stick out, round and high.

Harold took him into a room full of heavy furniture upholstered in plaid velvet. Harold's ashtray, almost as big as a toilet bowl, was on a stand by his chair.

He did not offer any food or drink. ‘Never let anyone put a foot into your home without putting something into their stomachs,' Tim's mother always said. Plumbers and electricians always got a legs-under-the-table tea, whatever the time of day. But Harold did not have that kind of mother. His was on his hit list.

While Tim struggled to find a path of small talk that could lead to money, Harold's veined protruding eyes roved round the room, looking too big for their sockets. When Tim finally dragged himself round to hinting at a loan, and then came right out with what it was for, Harold's eyes came to rest on his face.

He looked at Tim for a while and then he said, as if he were repeating a lesson, ‘
You
want
me
to loan you a couple of hundred quid?'

‘That's right.' Tim nodded brightly. ‘Just for a very short while. I get my bonus soon.'

‘When?'

‘You can't always tell, with Webster's.' Ha, ha, well we all know what
they
are. ‘Look, I hate to ask you, Harold, but you're – well, I do think of you as a friend.'

‘That so?' Harold dropped his cigarette end through the hole in the bowl of the ashtray. The stub must come out at the bottom of the stand. ‘I thought I'd scared you off, previous.'

‘Talking about – you mean, violence?'

‘Yeah. You tell the truth to some people, they think you're psycho.'

‘Oh, I don't.' Tim saw his chance. ‘I mean – I don't blame you for feeling like that.'

‘You'd back me up?' Harold looked at him over the huge hands that were lighting a cigarette. ‘When the day comes that I finally let 'em have it – you'll be on my side?'

‘Oh' – Tim crossed his fingers on both sides – ‘definitely.'

Harold gave a grunt and suddenly disappeared from view, as the back of his wide chair went down and a footrest shot out.

‘I'll pay you back, every penny, before you've even missed it,' Tim babbled to the yellowing soles of Harold's socks which were now up in the air. ‘I'll work, I'll moonlight, I'll do evenings in a pub, mow lawns, clean cars. And look – not having Butter – my car for a few weeks – look what I'll save on petrol.'

Harold gave him two hundred pounds, in cash. He went upstairs to get it, and came down with the money in a neat, clean bundle, as if he had stolen it from a bank.

‘Thanks – I mean thanks ever so.' The money burned in Tim's hands. Now that he had it, he almost wished he had not asked for it. ‘You're a real friend. If there's anything I can do for you …'

‘Pay it back.'

‘Oh, I will, cross my – er, my heart.'

‘Ten per cent interest.'

Tim had not thought of that. ‘Of course.'

Could he take the money and run, or did he have to stay and talk for the look of things?

‘Better get out before I throw you out,' Harold said, pleasantly enough.

Before Tim left, Harold produced one of his little cards and made him write out an IOU and sign it. Harold stuck the card in the frame of a picture painted on velvet of cows in blue moonlight in front of a ruined tower and a flat, reflecting lake.

When Tim sent off the money to the garage, he remembered that he should also be sending a ten pound note to Helen. He would get an envelope and a stamp from the office when Mr D. went to tea.

Mr D. did not take his tea break. One of his favourite customers, the wife of a famous racehorse trainer, was in the department, doing up a cottage for the stable lads, and Mr D., like a porpoise by the bows of an ocean liner, would not budge from her side.

Mrs Slade came in again. Tim liked her, and she liked him. Her husband hated the bathroom curtains, but she still came in from time to time to pick over the remnant tables or buy a bit of canvas seating. Tim gave her as much time as she wanted, while Gail thudded down another heavy roll of cloth on the table for a demanding customer, and glared at Tim.

By the time Tim and Mrs Slade had parted, mutually pleased, over a sample swatch of quilted lawn, and Tim had cleared up and checked his cash book, he was late knocking off. He missed his bus and had to wait for another, which was full. He did not think again about Helen's money until he was in bed with the light out, preparing the plot of a dream that he was going to try to explore.

Helen swam into his consciousness, standing meekly in her navy raincoat under the umbrella. Tim watched her walk away through the rain. He would not see her again, could not see her ever, after what had happened. She had been really nice about it, but she must be laughing her head off with the other women in the Hall School kitchen, as they fried mountains of chips and reduced spring cabbage to the consistency of wet laundry.

‘Get a car – get a girl.' Helen had never been in any way a
possible girl friend. How ludicrous. But now there was no one again. No one at all.

‘Don't give up,'
Pocket Pickups
said, in its reassuring ‘I believe in you' way. ‘You'll get snubs, sure, but you'll learn to say, “Your loss, darling,” and go on looking for the woman who's looking for you.'

The next evening, Tim wrote to Willard Freeman again, just a chummy fan letter, just to stay in touch: ‘Keep those books coming, Bill (that was how Willard had signed off, “All the best, Bill”). Your mate, Timothy (Varth) Kendall.'

The following evening, he wrote to Mary Gordon at the BBC Anything was better than writing to Helen Brown and enclosing ten pounds.

‘It was nice to hear you interviewing that woman who took her children across the Channel in a balloon.'

‘Did you not feel at all nairvous about putting the wee ones through that risk?' Mary had asked, so sympathetically that the rather bold woman had broken down and admitted, ‘Of course I did. I probably shouldn't have done it, really.'

Every day, Tim meant to send off Helen's money, and every day he didn't. Like walking back and forth past a crumpled paper on the floor and not being able to bend and pick it up, it had become one of those things he could not do. It wasn't the money. The ten pound note was already in the envelope and needed only a stamp.

An author had talked to Mary Gordon on the radio about having a writer's block. Tim had poster's block. The longer he left it, the harder it was.

Consulting the dictionary at
h
again, for Helen, he got the word ‘healing'.

The money would heal her regret, anxiety, annoyance – whatever it was she felt about lending it. No. The healing would happen to their friendship, that's what it was. That was why he had not posted it yet, because the omens said that he was meant to take it to her himself.

I can't. You can. I can't. You must. She won't want to know.
Yes, she will, with ten quid in your hand. Tell her you couldn't trust it to the post, see? All these sorters' strikes. You've got to make sure she gets it. And then – honest, chivalrous you – you can thank her for being so nice about Buttercup.

But it was too far to get to Helen's place without a car. No, not too far, too boring. From Tim's side of town, it meant changing buses twice.

The school kitchen staff probably came out at the same time as the children, so that mothers working there could take theirs home. On the afternoon of his next day off, Tim went to the Hall School.

It was raining again. Was the combination of him and Helen a rainmaker? They should hire themselves out to Ethiopia. Come to think of it, it had been raining the night they went to the musical show. Helen had put a gruesome plastic bonnet over her head as they splashed from the pizza place across the ill-drained terracing of the new theatre.

Outside the school, women waited with toddlers sealed into pushchairs with plastic covers, like pork chops in the meat display. A school crossing lady held up her lollipop sign in the driving rain, and hustled large children across the road. No sign of any grownups coming out of the school. No sign of Helen Brown.

Tim hung about, head sunk into shoulders hunched against the rain, until most of the parents had walked away. A few children were still straggling out. The lollipop lady waited for them, shrouded to the ground in an enormous shiny white coat, with a sort of hood down the back of her neck and sticking out over the high peak of her hat. She looked totally ridiculous.

Tim went up to ask her when the kitchen staff came out. She turned, in the stiff heavy coat that seemed to stand up by itself, and a cold, pinched face looked up at him under the hood. It was Helen.

‘Hullo,' she said, as if Tim were a father she saw every day.

‘I didn't know you – what are you –'

The lollipop raingear had been made for somebody twice her size. Even the pole and the sign overpowered her.

‘Excuse me.' She hoisted it up to stop a car, and shepherded two girls across the street. ‘I do this as an extra,' she said when she came back, ‘after we've finished in the kitchen. You're soaking wet.'

‘I know. I've got your money.' The envelope was folded in his hand inside his pocket.

‘Oh, thanks.' She looked surprised. ‘That's nice of you.'

‘Didn't you think I'd pay it back?'

She frowned and set her mouth. She looked so plain and pitiful inside the stiff white hood that Tim said, ‘Do you – would you like to go out somewhere at the weekend? I won't have the car yet, but–'

‘No, I can't. I'll have Julian with me.'

‘Oh yes, I forgot.'

‘But I'd like you to meet him. Look, don't give me the money now. The insides of these pockets are wet. Come up on Saturday and you can give it me then.'

When Helen opened the door to him, she was carrying, with difficulty, a boy of about seven, who was much too large to be carried.

Crippled legs?

‘Should I take him for you?' Tim asked uncertainly, as Helen started to struggle up the stairs with the boy.