The Ruby Slippers (13 page)

The knife is cold already in his hand, and the thought leaps in him that the metal walls are all wrapped around with ducts. Maybe he could stab all the way through. Pierce just one and the freezer dies. He lifts up the blade and brings it over hard at the corner of the wall closest to the control unit. It doesn’t give, but a dent is made. Encouraged, he swings over his arm in the same place. It gives, definitely gives, and looking closely he sees a tiny hole, though there is no hiss, no yielding of the machine. He aims for another spot – maybe, just maybe . . . He makes another mighty stab, but it ends in a jolt down his arm and a ping of steel: the knife is broken, the tip snapped off, gone brittle in the cold. He throws it down, appalled, the peril deeper yet in his guts. Someone will come by, surely, even if Grace is away. Someone will come along, needing milk or pasta or pet food and hoping for him to still be open. Yes, and then he will shout and all will be well. He stands stock-still, his ear at the hatch, listening for sounds: passing steps, a car, anything. He can just about hear distant traffic, he thinks, but nothing else. Even so, he will stay right where he is, keep calm, run on the spot and every ten minutes shout for help – starting now. He pumps up his lungs, pushes his chin up to the hole in the door and bellows as loud as he can, ‘Help!’ And then again, ‘Help! Help! Help!’ And he starts to run, a damaged bird hopping foot to foot. Someone will come. Surely they will – they cannot not!

■ ♦ ■

Time is the healer and the bad things have all fled. Harrison’s dealer, Finn, who happens to be a nice guy, invited him in, which has never happened before, and they have spent the last hour and a half together, getting weightless and shooting the breeze. They have argued about who is the best hitter, Pujols or Mauer, and who is the sexiest singer, Beyoncé or Shakira? And after that they put the world to rights between them. OK, crack has a bad name, but it can make a person feel better about things, which is a thing that people simply do not understand. And all that shit about drugs damaging brain cells and stuff – nothing but politician talk, getting ordinary people insecure about themselves and making demons out of guys like them. They would do well to consider that so-called bad things in life can keep a man from doing far worse.

When at last Harrison is let out into the drizzling night, he feels good about himself and has worked up an appetite. He is almost looking forward to going back home, even if it means listening to Aunt Crystal going on about the old days and Jesus and stuff. She’s a good enough soul after all, and can be a comfort. Just watch, she will have something ‘plated up’ for him, ready to go in the oven soon as he gets in.

As he takes the shortest cut for home, a smell of other foods frying seeps in through the rainy haze, causing him to glance across and take in a scene he knows so well he sees it before it is in sight. There, outside the day centre where the sidewalk widens, is the night kitchen of the Elim Tabernacle Pentecostal Church – a grand title for a battered old food-trailer and two trestle tables under a rickety canopy. One customer alone is there – a wasted-looking guy who, by his clothes, doesn’t seem too far gone, but by the fact that he cannot sit up straight even to drink a coffee, plainly is. Harrison lowers his head to walk on, but then he sees a pretty black girl about his own age emerge from the side door of the trailer, carrying in her hand a bacon sandwich – the source of the aroma – which she places on the table in front of the man. She makes a homely remark, her voice round and musical in the night, hoping to bring the man to his senses – at least those required for eating a sandwich. Then she goes behind him to prop him up and even places the sandwich in his hand, guiding him to raise it to his mouth. Harrison watches fascinated: this girl cannot be for real; she is too young, too beautiful for this. He crosses the road and stands at the counter until the man, un-sensing of her kindness, slumps forward like a fallen statue, his forehead pressing the sandwich to the plate. She goes back to her place in the trailer, wiping her hands and smiling: ‘Well, that’s one way to keep your food warm.’

‘What you doin’ here?’ he asks right out and as dumb as they come.

‘What am I doing here? Well, I would have thought that was pretty obvious.’

‘How come I never seen you here before?’

‘How come I never seen
you
here before? Can I get you a sandwich?’

‘I don’t want no sandwich. Whaddya think I am?’

‘I dunno – a nice guy passing by late at night who might appreciate a sandwich?’ Then she smiles, to raise a smile from his own defensive face. And he goes on to tell her in no uncertain terms how he is no street bum; how the Elim Tabernacle is his Great Aunt Crystal’s church, and how, a few times when he was small and she was better on her feet, he had helped out here. Like her, he had served up soup and slopped down tables, but then Aunt Crystal’s arthritis got real bad and stopped her going and other things took his time. In all this talk of Christian fellowship, Harrison doesn’t get round to mentioning his fondness for crack. Instead, he asks her name.

‘Rain,’ she says, with simplicity to match her beauty.

‘Rain? Like what come outta the sky?’

‘Like what’s landing on your head right now.’

‘Rain. Cool. That’s cool. So tell me, why you do this?’

Slowly and thoughtfully, she answers the question she has never had to answer before. She explains to Harrison that she does this because of her faith, because she too belongs to the Tabernacle and has met his great aunt and thought that she was cute. Harrison smiles and falls silent. He does not mention how that same sweet old lady once stood by when Uncle Henry whipped him buckle-end first with a belt, and him descended from slaves. And how, when he had later questioned Henry’s Christian kindness, she had shrugged and said, ‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways.’

‘But it still don’t explain nothing. Like why you choose to do this over any other thing?’ he begs to know, persistent.

‘Because it’s good and it does good.’

‘Give good to people and they pay you back in bad.’

‘Give good to people and maybe they will find some good inside themselves.’

He points at the folded wino: ‘No way. Look at this guy here, you put food inside this man, he gets a free meal, that’s all. Any money he can beg, borrow or steal from someone, he will use to buy more booze. And that’s the way it goes. Believe me, I know.’

But her shining spirit is not deterred: ‘True, it’s the way it sometimes goes, but I believe, I
have
to believe that always in my life there is someone who needs me to be good, even if I don’t know it at the time. It’s why we have to do it.’

‘We? Speak for yourself.’

‘I speak for all. Believe me, there is always someone who needs us more than we know. If you stop to think about it, really think and shut out all the crap, you will see there is someone in your world right now who needs you, totally needs you to be good.’

He almost laughs out loud. As if he could ever do good in the world, as if there was someone who ever needed him. As if . . . then it hits him, a sledgehammer; it hits him and turns his smile to thunder.

‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ She gawps as he swims back slowly from his mind’s dark swamp and whimpers: ‘How . . . how cold can it get . . . inside a refrigerator?’

‘What? Is that some kind of a weird philosophical question?’

‘It’s a totally fucking real question. How cold is it inside a refrigerator?’

‘I dunno. Cold that’s for sure. But why—?’

‘Could a person die if they was in a refrigerator?’

‘I guess so. Yes, of course.’

‘How long would it take?’

‘To die?’ By the fact that the lonely boy whose name she doesn’t even know has turned practically white, Rain knows it’s no silly joke. ‘Hours, minutes – I have no idea,’ she says.

‘Shit!’ he says, and takes to his heels.

■ ♦ ■

He gave up jogging on the spot a half-hour ago, his chest so tight and his legs so stiff and shaking there was nothing left in him to give. So now he falls back limp against the door, sweat creeping cold under his clothes and his ears ringing from yelling, though he has no idea if his cries reached through three inches of insulation. In his despair, he begins to hallucinate, the walls closing in and the light from the bare bulb dropping down from dismal to tomb-dark. Even if by some miracle someone comes, he has been delivered into wretched places inside himself that he has never owned to before. How pathetic he is, whining and squirming – one moment calling out for some kind soul to come and rescue him and the next hurling obscenities at the same imagined person and every other hateful bastard in the stinking world who failed to hear his cries.

His heart starts to race again, and once more he works it down, slows his breathing to nothing, no longer to think clear and stay smart, but just to have some grip on who and what he is beneath the spiralling fear. ‘Slow down!’ he snarls at himself. ‘The more it beats, the more you die; the more you shout, the more you die; the more you move, the more you – no, no that can’t be right. Oh God, which is it, what am I supposed to —?’ In the end, he gets so tangled up trying to have a single clear thought that he simply has to let all his thoughts go. And so, seizing in the brain by seconds, Michael Marcinkus slides down the wall, surrendering mind and body, all of him, to the winter-hard floor where thoughts that have been coiled up in him for an age start to unwind and seep away.

And so he is taken from the frozen hell he is in towards the other unspeakable time and place where once before the cold came close to taking him . . .

■ ♦ ■

‘Keep going, Mihails. This is how we find things. This is how we stay alive . . .’

He follows the rasping voice through the fog of time and sees his father, as large as life, a blunted hatchet in his hand, bringing it down as forcefully as his famished body will allow, upon a heap of rubble. Ice is everywhere – in the cobbles, iron-hard and treacherous; in the rubble suffocating under the weight of snow; and in the houses, what is left of them, hung with icicles and frozen to the last brick. Winter has stretched out its icy hand even here, across the vast stinking spit of waste that is the city midden. In warmer times this land has been their hope and their provider, but now it’s seized by an icy spell, cast to cheat the starving of their last scrap.

‘The winter will leave and the Germans with it.’ His father smiles, the low sun in his face, making his ravaged features appear all the more dire. He looks like he, too, has been claimed by ice, in the straggles of his beard, in the glassiness of his eye and in the pallor of his skull-stretched face. ‘It took the Russians and it will take them. Just you wait and see.’

The Germans will soon be on the run – that is the rumour. He has heard it on other tongues, not just his father’s, so maybe there is truth in it. There has been a breakthrough, hundreds, thousands of miles away, they say, and the allies will come. They are like the sun, the Nazis, cruel and unforgiving for their season, but one day a new sun will rise to take their place, and they will fall out of the sky and be no more.

He turns, eyes narrowing against the same pallid sun that lights his father’s face. He can look straight at it and not flinch, but even so it taunts with its faraway brilliance. So what if the Germans should fall one day? They are starving here and now. Everyone is. Why can the sun not lend them its heat and melt through this damn ice, so that he might find a potato or two, or the rotten end of a cabbage to take home to his poor suffering mother?

■ ♦ ■

Normally, the Park is full of phantoms for Harrison. He hates to cross it at night, the trees looming and reaching, the moody waters ebbing and clouds passing, moon-troubled. But as he runs at the very stretch, the ghostly things are no more than backdrops flashing by, and all the images of terror are inside him. He sees the grocer laid out stiff, shaped ice-hard for a casket. Then he sees him preserved forever in a frantic pose: the twisted face, stubs of fingers worn to bleeding where he flailed and scraped.

Vaulting the far fence and weaving between hurtling cars, Harrison prays unashamed, prays the horror story went a different way, that the grocer woman came back not too late and let her husband out, that the grocer has a special key for tight spots like this, that there is another door he didn’t even know about. But as he runs the length of 99
^th
, his mind is all stabbed through with self-reproach. How could he forget leaving a man in a freezer, a thing so real and shocking as that? How could he have walked off and just gone about his business? He must be crazy, insane, and all they ever said was right: no better than a space-wasting, mother-fucking crack-head psycho!

Turning towards the deli, seeing its frontage ever-sharpening out of its dark surroundings, he slows his step. Even in his urgency, fear winds him down. The shutter is still raised – she did not come back; the old man cannot have escaped; he’s dead! Fear crawls cold around him. He ducks below the shutter, pushes open the door – how come nobody noticed? – and sneaks along, fearful, for the cold-store door. In all the darkness, his eyes are drawn to the centre panel casting out a sickly smear of light. The glass is out: there are the pieces. The old man must have smashed it trying to escape. Harrison half hopes to see the seething face in the frame, but there is nothing. He straightens up and steels himself to look through the stark hole. Nothing can he see but hams hanging and wicked hooks. He bows his head, rocking between the choices. It could not be simpler: walk away, let death be and hope it never comes back to haunt him. Or stay, open up the door, see death if it is there and hope against hope for life. He straightens himself, throws the handle and hauls open the door. Stepping in he sees no sign. Thank God! Maybe the grocer did find a way out. But then he spins round and sees it, there, that slumped heap, that bundle, neither death laid out, nor mangled horror. Marcinkus the grocer sits against the wall beside the door, his head, with the apron wrapped around it, flopped over to the side. His legs are stretched out before him, as if he were an infant sat down tired at kindergarten and gone to sleep.