The Touch of Innocents (32 page)

‘For the first time in months something other than heroin began to get through to me. And, by the time she died three months later, I was able to stand with my brother and the rest of my family to say goodbye properly. She asked that I read the lesson at her funeral. She was one hell of a mother.’

‘I wish I could have known her.’

‘In a way you do. You’re very much like her. No half commitments, no going back. You remind me very much of my mother, Izzy.’

She bit her lip, finding no words.

‘At least, in some ways you do. I never had an irresistible urge to tear the clothes from my mother’s back.’

‘I guess it’s these little things that make the big differences in a relationship.’

They spent the rest of the night talking and sharing, grateful for the tug of discovery that was distracting from the tension rising inside. Yet it was an uneven battle. As dawn began to pick its way through the winter sky they decided they could sit no longer. The warmth of the café had begun to stifle, the caffeine eating away at their control, so they had stepped into the morning air that had an edge of ice and revived their spirits.

They found a public washroom and freshened their bodies, Izzy at last able to remove the mask of coagulated make-up that remained smeared around her face. For a long time she stared intently in the mirror above the bowl of ancient, cracked porcelain, looking into the eyes. There she saw Bella, in the colour, in the shape, in the soul behind. She reached out to touch, to grab back; the mirror smudged, the image blurred and faded. Her heart stopped. Would this be all she ever had left of her child? A haunted image, every time she looked into a mirror? Quickly she splashed more cold water over her face, lest people think they were tears washing down her cheeks.

By ten they were in Endeavour Road, unable to contain their impatience. A cold front had passed across the capital during the night, taking with it
the rain and leaving a day crisply cold but bright with a few high clouds from behind which the sun frequently ventured. Even in winter, life on Endeavour was lived on the street, spilled out from within the dark terraces: shouted greetings and insults that flew across the street, double-parked cars and delivery vans that choked it, school kids who littered and loitered, mothers who tried to shield their eyes and their infants as they forced passage along cluttered pavements. They were black, white, dark, with accents of Celtic fringes and Caribbean isles, the peninsulas and outposts of Europe, and some that were incomprehensibly Middle Eastern.

The noise of rasta and rock and the protest of car horns mingled with the smell of fish stalls and curry houses, and dry cleaners, and bakeries, and things that smelled less sweet. Of ageing anchovies, and worse.

Basement England.

A middle-aged man in three-piece suit and scruffy shoes stumbled by, yesterday’s button hole drooping from his lapel, demanding in broad Scottish dialect to know why they – whoever ‘they’ might be, he didn’t specify – couldn’t pronounce their fucking consonants properly. A one-man revolution against Estuary English. This was not so much a melting pot, more a pot that simmered and occasionally boiled.

And at the end of the street, like an architectural exclamation mark, stood Triumph Towers, an alien creation from another world come to invade and enslave. A brown concrete fortress thrust for twenty-eight storeys towards the sky, blocking out the light and casting a shadow on those who lived around and within it. A self-contained city of many hundreds of people but a home only to diseased urban pigeons
and abandoned dreams, a towering monument to bureaucratic expediency that had been raised by planners in the sixties only to be targeted by their sons thirty years later for demolition. Except the money had run out. The bloody cuts. And, anyway, who cared?

Then it was twelve o’clock and they were in the Trafalgar.

He was three minutes late, arriving harassed, wearing his clothes of the previous night. He was breathless as he approached her, his chest heaving; she found she could not breathe at all.

‘Mine’s a large Scotch,’ he demanded.

She nodded at the barman.

‘And two ’undred pounds.’

The squeeze, as expected.

‘Forget it.’ Izzy began moving away.

‘For the address you can find ’er at right now.’

Izzy stopped, turned, looked him directly in the eye in search of any hint of sincerity. Not a trace.

‘All right.’

‘Money up front.’

From within her bag Izzy removed the torn fifty, then three more fifties. Slowly she laid them on the counter, the half on top of the whole, and carefully tore the whole notes in two.

‘What the f—?’

‘My guarantee you’re not just another pimple-squeezing creep,’ she responded.

‘I don’t bleedin’ like you,’ he spat.

‘But you like my money.’ She pushed the three new halves across to him. ‘And you’d love a full set.’

He snatched the scraps of notes and glowered at her, bluff called, his game lost. Then the whisky arrived, he downed it in one and with it seemed to swallow his aggression. He started laughing.

‘The address,’ Izzy demanded, fear suddenly smothering her.

Still nothing but a coarse laugh.

She needed to be strong, desperately wanted to stand firm but inside she felt herself melting like a wax doll in Hell. Her resistance and confidence were evaporating, she began wobbling and surely he could see?

The pimple-sore lips kept laughing.

‘Where is she?’ she demanded, waving the notes.

‘In ’eaven,’ he spluttered through a sneer.

‘Where?’

‘’Eaven. In ’eaven. With a haitch.’

‘Heaven. Heaven, you mean. She’s dead?’ Her knees began to buckle.

He was laughing all the more, the lips curling in contempt. ‘No. Not dead, you stupid cow. Not yet, at least. In ’eaven. Where people crawl off to die and kiss an angel’s arse. Up in the clouds. Look out the bloody window. There,’ he said, demanded, pointing with a broken nail. ‘In Triumph Towers. The nearest most of us are gonna get to bloody ‘eaven.’

‘She’s there? But where?’

He smirked, looking closely at the half-notes in her hand. She threw two of them on the counter. ‘There must be three hundred apartments in that building. Which one?’

He smoothed the two crumpled halves. ‘Twen’y-fifth floor.’

Another half.

‘Which apartment?’

His smile had disappeared. ‘Look, I dunno. I swear to you she’s there, but I dunno which apartment. You told me not to get too ’eavy. Christ, lady, there’s only ten doors on each bleedin’ floor, surely you can figure that bit out for yourself?’ He picked nervously
at his teeth. ‘And if I don’t get that other ’alf I’ll be up there screaming before you even get a chance to start asking.’

But he was wasting his breath. The note was already fluttering towards him. Izzy was running out the door.

They ran the three hundred yards, forcing their way through the flotsam of polystyrene wrappers and pock-marked derelicts that blew about in search of a leeward corner or crevice. The sun had disappeared behind the clouds, the grey fingers of winter settling upon the street and around Izzy’s heart. Cold wind drew tears to her eyes, making them moist to the point of flooding. Like Devereux’s. Something inside kept insisting she was running straight into his grasp.

The gates to Heaven were ajar, the intercom system and huge electronic lock broken, the doors creaking in the wind. A vandalized reception desk stood inside and from behind it St Peter, in the shape of a harassed old man with grey face and straggly beard, tussled with the demands of a family group consisting of shawled women who were all talking at the same time while two infants idly kicked the doors to the lifts. In the small office behind the reception desk a telephone rang, unanswered. As Izzy and Daniel strode past St Peter waved a restraining arm in their direction.

‘Paulette. Twenty-fifth floor,’ Izzy shouted over her shoulder, not wishing to catch his eye.

A second telephone started ringing; a child, ears boxed, started wailing. The jabbering of foreign tongues lashed around his ears and the old man subsided, resistance withered. He rather wished someone would steal the entire building instead of just
the TV sets and electrical fittings, but who would want it?

Beside the lifts stood a great concrete urn, positioned there for some plant long since ripped out by children and replaced to overflowing with rubbish and refuse. The lift was all steel. Soiled. And slow. The count up to twenty-five seemed to take forever.

They sprang out into a corridor of pebble-dash, along the right-hand side of which painted doors stretched into the distance. On the other side, through pigeon-smeared double glazing, they found a view of the city that even at a moment such as this caught her breath. Beneath them stretched London, a mosaic of patterns built from the blocks of urban life, the roofs and roadways, the lines, the circles, crescents, parks and parkways, everything in miniature, tussling for supremacy and reaching out to the rural suburbs that lay through the winter mists beyond.

The corridor stank.

‘Which one?’ whispered Daniel.

They worked their way along. The doors were little more than flimsy barricades separating occupant from outside world. Through the first came the shouts of an exasperated mother screaming at children; through the second a snatch of the lunchtime television news. Daniel shook his head. Addicts don’t give a toss about wars or weather reports. The third was enclosed behind a huge steel shutter on which kids had scratched obscenities and offensive remarks about each other, and around which spiders had spun dust-filled webs. The fourth had an angry black scorch mark creeping up from the letterbox; a woman was singing in Portuguese within. The fifth was silent. They both placed ears against the
woodwork but caught no trace of movement or occupation. Izzy shrugged. Try again later.

As they stood before the next door, they could hear the unmistakable sound of coughing. Harsh, raking fits of expulsion, desiccated fragments of pain. A woman’s pain. A young woman. Who was also whimpering.

Daniel raised his hand, motioning Izzy to stay while he ran down the corridor to conduct a fleeting inspection of the remaining doors, but within seconds he was back, shaking his head.

‘This is it, isn’t it?’ she said. Inside her something was twisting, something sharp was scraping at her, causing her heart to pound and her head to swim.

Daniel stepped back from the door, took a deep breath and prepared to launch himself at it. ‘Why do I always appear to be throwing myself at chunks of solid tree?’ he enquired mournfully.

‘Because you’re too damned impatient,’ she whispered. She pushed the door gently. It gave. On the latch.

A hallway. Cramped. Darkened. The only light came from an open door at the far end, through which drifted the sound of more hacking coughs. They crept forward, making as little sound as they could.

The room was small, scarcely more than twelve feet square, with stain-spattered vinyl flooring and walls covered in floral-patterned paper that had all but faded to invisibility. Some of the paper sagged away from the ceiling and had been torn, elsewhere a desultory attempt to paint over the years of damage had been abandoned before the butter-milk emulsion had reached the first corner. One of the walls was stained for several feet of its length towards the door by something which from its sight and stench
they could only take to be vomit. Recent vomit. Although the sliding door leading to a balcony was ajar, the sour smell still hung heavily in the air, mixing with the stale aroma of food, some of which still infested the jumble of dirty plates that had been pushed into one corner.

There was no form of decoration on the bare walls, no TV, a naked bulb hanging from the light fitting, a rusting radiator. Anything of use was gone. Stripped away. Sold.

A low coffee table and two dilapidated chairs provided the only formal furniture, supplemented by chunks of foam rubber over which had been thrown old blankets. On one of these pieces of foam rubber squatted the young woman.

She was bare-footed, emaciated, clad in black leggings and jumper that served only to emphasize the unnatural paleness of her skin. The hair, which might once have been blonde, was now too filthy for anyone to be sure. One arm of the jumper had been pushed up several inches beyond the elbow and around the upper arm had been twisted the cotton cord of a bathrobe. One end of the cord was in the woman’s mouth, her teeth exposed like a dog at a bone, tugging to increase the pressure. The crease of the elbow was blotched and scabbed with a series of angry holes which the woman was slapping with her free hand in an attempt to incite a vein to break through the covering of scabs.

On the table in front of her lay a small square of paper, a bent spoon. Alongside them was the cigarette lighter with which she had reduced the heroin to liquid form in the spoon, dissolved in the acidic juice from a mangled lemon that lay squashed on the floor. A razor blade. Chewed cigarette filter. And a syringe.

‘Paulette?’ Izzy gasped.

The woman glanced up: the same glassy, haunted eyes that Izzy remembered, but instead of exhaustion now ablaze with energy, frightened, hyperactive, like a player tensed up before the Big Game. That same face, more corpse-like even than Izzy had pictured in her nightmares, vacant, lifeless wax. It was she.

Paulette ignored them and returned to her search for an injectable vein.

‘Paulette!’ Izzy exclaimed more sharply.

Something crept into the girl’s eyes, a spark, a glowing coal of anger, yet again she said nothing, the arm band clenched firmly between her teeth, her irritation at being disturbed expressed only in the still more violent slapping she inflicted upon her circulatory system.

Izzy was the first to react. She sprang across the room and before the girl could respond had snatched the plastic syringe.

‘Where is my baby?’

‘Give it back!’

‘My baby? What have you done with my baby?’

With an animal’s screech of rage Paulette threw herself after her syringe but the low table was between her and Izzy; she stumbled and fell sharply on her exposed arm. For a while she lay there, whimpering with pain.

‘Give it back to me,’ she pleaded in pathetic voice.

‘Not until you tell me what you did with my baby,’ Izzy responded from a safe distance.

‘Who are you? Why don’t you leave me alone?’

Paulette’s eyes were focused on nothing but the syringe. Izzy held it behind her, placing her body between the girl and her desires.

‘Look at me. Remember? The hospital!’

Paulette’s eyes blinked in exaggerated pain. Everything was blurred, her needle had disappeared, and through the mists emerged a face. Something about a hospital. And she remembered.

‘You!’ she exclaimed involuntarily.

‘Yes. And my baby. You stole her, didn’t you? Where is she now?’

‘Let me have the bloody works. I need it.’ Paulette’s frail arm stretched out. ‘I’ll talk later.’

‘You’ll tell me now.’

And Izzy had produced the syringe, waved it towards Paulette and depressed the plunger. A narrow stream of liquid sprang from the needle and splattered like rain across the table in front of Paulette. The girl uttered a primitive, wrenching cry. From behind her Izzy scarcely noted the groan of anguish from Daniel.

‘Please …’ the girl sobbed.

‘First, my baby. Then you can have it. If there’s any left.’

‘I know nothing,’ she lied.

A fresh fountain of heroin arced across the room. The girl stared at Izzy, hatred twisting her features, but in the other woman’s eyes Paulette found a craving, an anger almost greater than her own, and a strength that her lies and deception could never match. Her needs grew, and her resistance crumbled.

‘All right, all right,’ the girl pleaded. ‘No more.’

‘What happened to my baby?’

She wanted to lie, to deny, but her ability to invent had been diluted in pain. It took Paulette many seconds to fight for control of her shattered nerves and shaking limbs before she began, in halting words, to tell her story. To trade the truth, just as she had traded everything else.

‘I had … a baby,’ she stumbled. ‘Not mine.
Someone else’s. A little girl, for adoption. Her foster mother had fallen ill, couldn’t cope, so I had collected the baby to take to her new foster parents.’ She was shivering all over. ‘But I dropped it. I must have blacked out or something. Stumbled. Next thing I knew it was at the bottom of the stairs and its eyes were closed. It was hurt, very pale. I couldn’t wake it. Didn’t mean to harm it,’ she sobbed. ‘So I took it to the hospital. I wanted to help it! Don’t you understand?’

‘Get on with it,’ Izzy demanded. She was trembling too.

‘I got to the hospital. The baby was in my arms. And everyone was running about, there was no one to pay any attention to me.’

‘The fire alarm,’ Izzy prompted.

The girl nodded. ‘I was wandering around looking for a nurse. By this time I think the baby had stopped breathing. I was so scared! Then I went behind a curtain and there you were. Blood all down your face. Unconscious. And your baby. Just about the same age. Smiling.’

‘She’s … alive.’ Izzy scarcely dared breathe the words.

The girl nodded.

‘Bella’s alive,’ she whispered. ‘Alive …’ Her voice faded away in a feeble, choked cry as the passion of release rushed to her throat. For a moment she was unable to fight through the tangle of emotions – to laugh, to exult, to shed tears, to shout or succumb to the feeling that someone had cut the wires holding her together inside. She felt light-headed, but through it all she clung fixedly to the fact that there was more, much more, still to be done.

‘You bitch!’ Izzy had turned cold with fury. ‘You swapped them, didn’t you? My baby for yours.’

‘What else was I supposed to do? There was no one around. You looked as if you were dead anyway. I couldn’t admit to harming the baby. They would have found out everything.’

‘About the drugs. About how you and Fauld were farming babies through the Mission. Selling babies to the highest bidder.’

The girl hung her head in exhaustion and shame.

‘And how your father was covering up for you.’

The girl’s head sprang back. ‘My father! Help me?’ she spat incredulously. ‘Damn him, don’t you see this is all his fault? The big man who was supposed to be so much better than everyone else. The pillar of the community. The statesman everyone respected. But while he was out playing bloody God to the country, where was he when I needed him? When my mother needed him?’ She clutched her stomach in agony.

‘He’s fought ruthlessly to cover up for you.’

‘Guilt. Nothing but guilt. The bastard.’ And she sobbed, a cry of more than physical pain. ‘Please, let me have my needle.’

‘Not until you tell me what you did with my baby.’ Izzy lunged aggressively forward, barely conscious of the restraining hand from behind.

Paulette’s eyes had begun to blur. ‘Please,’ she whimpered.

More droplets spattered onto the floor.

‘What did you do with my baby?’

The girl drew in a huge gulp of breath that shook her gaunt frame as though it might break. ‘I took her from the hospital. Nobody noticed. I came with a baby, left with a baby. And I gave a baby to the new foster parents, just like I was supposed to.’

‘So where is she now?’ cried Izzy in frustration, raising the syringe above her head as if to hurl it to the ground.

‘No!’ Paulette screamed, hiding her head in her hands and cowering like a dog. She remained in that position, whimpering.

The silence stirred nothing but hatred within Izzy. This woman had ripped Bella from her, stolen her child and with it Izzy’s life, had inflicted evils that all but surpassed comprehension. Now she was pleading for sympathy.

There was none to give. Izzy had no resources for sympathy. She thrust the hypodermic at Daniel, scarcely aware of the tormented hand that took it, then turned to face the cringing woman once more. She would not allow Paulette to cower from the truth. She lifted the girl’s shoulders, expecting to find tear-soaked eyes but to her surprise found not weakness but eyes that burned with malice. And action.