Fallen Angel

While the weather was warm, he would often leave Stanley and Thelma, encased in their old and evil-smelling carcasses, in front of the television and escape to the long, wild garden. He listened to the trains screaming and rattling on the line beyond Carver’s. Sometimes he glimpsed Mrs Reynolds among the geraniums on the balcony of the Reynoldses’ flat. Once he saw her talking earnestly with a large, fat woman who he guessed was Jenny Wren. The ugly duckling, Eddie told himself, had become an even uglier duck.

Over the years the tangle of trees and bushes at the far end of the Graces’ garden had expanded both vertically and horizontally. The fence separating the back gardens of 27 and 29 Rosington Road had been repaired long before. But there was still a hole in the fence at the back: too small for Eddie’s plump adult body, but obviously used by small animals – cats, perhaps, or even foxes.

Thelma said that Carver’s was an eyesore. According to Stanley, the site of the bombed engineering works had not been redeveloped because its ownership was in dispute – a case of Dickensian complexity involving a family trust, missing heirs and a protracted court case.

‘Someone’s sitting on a gold mine there,’ Stanley remarked on many occasions, for the older he became the more he repeated himself. ‘You mark my words. A bloody gold mine. But probably the lawyers will get the lot.’

Time had on the whole been kind to Carver’s, for creepers had softened the jagged brick walls and rusting corrugated iron; saplings had burst through the cracked concrete and grown into trees. Cow parsley, buddleia and rosebay willowherb brought splashes of white and purple and pink. It was a wonder, Eddie thought, that the ruins had not become a haven for crack-smoking delinquents from the council flats or Social Security parasites in search of somewhere to drink and sleep. Perhaps the ghosts kept them away. Not that it was easy to get into Carver’s, except from the back gardens of Rosington Road. To the north was the railway, to the east and west were high walls built when bricks and labour were cheap. Access by road was down a narrow lane beside the infants’ school which ended in high gates festooned with barbed wire and warning notices.

Eddie was safe from prying eyes at the bottom of the garden. He liked to kneel and stare through the hole into Carver’s. The shed was still there, smaller and nearer than in memory, with two saplings of ash poking through its roof. One evening in September, he levered out the plank beside the hole and, his heart thudding, wriggled through the enlarged opening. Once inside he stood up and looked around. Birds sang in the distance.

Eddie picked his way towards the shed, skirting a large clump of nettles and a bald tyre. The shed’s door had parted company with its hinges and fallen outwards. He edged inside. Much more of the roof had gone. Over half of the interior was now filled with the saplings and other vegetation. There were rags, two empty sherry bottles and a scattering of old cigarette ends on the floor; occasionally, it seemed, other people found their way into Carver’s. He looked slowly around, hoping to see the paint tin that he and Alison had used for the Peeing Game, hoping for some correspondence between past and present.

Everything had changed. A sob wrenched its way out of his throat. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut. A tear rolled slowly down his left cheek. Here he was, he thought, a twenty-five-year-old failure. What had he been expecting to find? Alison with the pink ribbon in her hair, Alison twirling like a ballerina and smiling up at him?

Eddie stumbled outside. On his way back to the fence he looked up. To his horror, he saw through the branches of trees, high above the top of the wall, Mrs Reynolds on the balcony of her flat. Something flashed in her hands, a golden dazzle reflecting the setting sun. Eddie ran through the nettles to the fence and flung himself at the hole. A moment later he was back in the garden of 29 Rosington Road. His glasses had fallen off and he had torn a hole in his trousers.

When his breathing was calmer, Eddie forced himself to stroll to the house. At the door he glanced back. Mrs Reynolds was still on her balcony. She was staring over Carver’s through what looked like a pair of field glasses. At least she wasn’t looking at him. Not now. He shivered, and went inside.

Autumn became winter. After Christmas, Stanley caught a cold and the cold, as often happened with him, turned to bronchitis. No one noticed until it was too late that this time the bronchitis was pneumonia. He died early in February, aged seventy-two.

In recent years the trickle of LVs had died away. But until a few days before his death Stanley continued to visit the basement to work on the latest dolls’ house.

Since his retirement he had slowed down, and the quality of his work had also deteriorated. But the last model was nearly complete, a tall Victorian terraced house looking foolish without its fellows on either side. He had been sewing the curtains at the time of his death.

Stanley died in hospital in the early hours of the morning. The following afternoon Eddie found the miniature curtains bundled into the sitting-room wastepaper basket, together with Stanley’s needles and cottons. The discovery brought home to him the reality of his father’s death more than anything else before or later, even the funeral.

This was a secular event. The Graces had never been churchgoers. Eddie’s experience of religion had been limited to the services at school, flat and meaningless affairs.

‘He was an atheist,’ Thelma said firmly when the funeral director tentatively raised the subject of the deceased’s religious preferences. ‘You can keep the vicars out of it, all right? And we don’t want any of those humanists, either.’

His mother’s reaction to Stanley’s death took Eddie by surprise. She showed no outward sign of grief. She gave the impression that death was an irritation and an imposition because of the extra work it entailed. In many ways widowhood seemed to act as a tonic: she was brisker than she had been for years, both physically and mentally.

‘If we can clear out some of your father’s stuff,’ Thelma said as they ate fish and chips in the kitchen on the evening after the funeral, ‘perhaps we can find a lodger.’

Eddie put down his fork. ‘But you wouldn’t want a stranger in the house, would you?’

‘If we want to stay here, we’ve no choice.’

‘But the house is paid for. And haven’t you got a pension from the Paladin?’

‘Call it a pension? Don’t make me laugh. I’ve already talked to them about it. I’ll get a third of what your father got, and that wasn’t much to begin with. It makes me sick. He worked there for over forty years, and you’d think by the way they used to go on that they couldn’t do enough for their staff. They’re sharks. Just like everyone else.’

‘But surely we could manage?’

‘We can’t live on air.’ She stared at him, pursing her lips. ‘When you get another job, perhaps we can think again.’

When. The word hung between them. Eddie knew that his mother meant not when but if. Like his father, she had a low opinion of his capabilities. He thought that she could not have made the point more clearly if she had spoken the word if aloud.

‘So we’re agreed, then,’ Thelma announced.

‘I suppose so.’

She nodded at his plate, at half a portion of cod in greasy batter and a mound of pale, cold chips. ‘Have you finished, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, pass it here.’ Thelma’s appetite, always formidable for such a small person, had increased since she had stopped smoking the previous summer. ‘Waste not, want not.’

‘So we’ll need to clear the back bedroom?’

‘It won’t clear itself, will it?’ said Thelma through a mouthful of Eddie’s supper. ‘And while we’re at it, we might as well sort out the basement. If we have a lodger we’ll need the extra storage space.’

The next few days were very busy. His mother’s haste seemed indecent. The back bedroom had been used as a boxroom for as long as Eddie could remember. Thelma wanted him to throw out most of the contents. She also packed up her husband’s clothes and sent them to a charity shop. One morning she told Eddie to start clearing the basement. Most of the tools and photographic equipment could be sold, she said.

‘It’s not as if you’re that way inclined, after all. You’d better get rid of the photos, too.’

‘What about the dolls’ house?’

‘Leave that for now. But mind you change your trousers. Wear the old jeans, the ones with the hole in the knee.’

Eddie went through the photographs first – the artistic ones in the cupboard, not the ones on the open shelves. The padlock key had vanished. In the end Eddie levered off the hasp with a crowbar.

The photographs had been carefully mounted in albums. The negatives were there too, encased in transparent envelopes and filed in date order in a ring binder. Against each print his father had written a name and a date in his clear, upright hand. Usually he had added a title. ‘Saucy!’ ‘Blowing Bubbles!’ ‘Having the Time of Her Life!’

Eddie leafed slowly through the albums, working backwards. Some of the photographs he thought were quite appealing, and he decided that he would put them to one side to look at more carefully in his bedroom. Most of the girls he recognized. He came across his younger self, too, but did not linger over those photographs. He found the Reynoldses’ daughter, Jenny Wren, and was astonished to see how ugly she had been as a child; memory had been relatively kind to her. Then he found another face he knew, smiling up at him from a photograph with the caption ‘What a Little Tease!’ He stared at the face, his excitement ebbing, leaving a dull sadness behind.

It was Alison. There was no possible room for doubt. Stanley must have taken the photograph at some point during the same summer as the Peeing Game. When else could it have been? Children grew quickly at that age. In the photograph Alison was naked, and just as Eddie remembered her from their games in Carver’s. He even remembered, or thought he did, the ribbon that she wore in her hair.

They had both betrayed him, his father and Alison. Why hadn’t Alison told him? She had been his friend.

After lunch that day his mother sent him out to do some shopping. Eddie was glad of the excuse to escape from the house. He could not stop thinking of Alison. He had not seen her for nearly twenty years, yet her face seen in a photograph still had the power to haunt him.

On his way home, Eddie met Mr and Mrs Reynolds in Rosington Road. He turned the corner and there they were. He had no chance to avoid them. The Graces and the Reynoldses had been on speaking terms since Jenny Wren’s visits to the dolls’ house. Eddie glanced at Mrs Reynolds’s sour, unsympathetic face, wondering whether she had seen him trespassing in Carver’s the previous autumn.

‘Sorry to hear about your dad,’ Mr Reynolds said, his face creasing with concern. ‘Still, at least it was quick: that must have been a blessing for all of you.’

‘Yes. It was very sudden.’

‘Always a good neighbour. Couldn’t have asked for a nicer one.’

The words were intended to comfort, but made Eddie smile, an expression he concealed by turning away and blowing his nose vigorously, as though overwhelmed by the sorrow of the occasion. As he did so he noticed that Mrs Reynolds was staring at him. He dropped his eyes to her chest. He noticed on the lapel of her coat a small enamel badge from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Perhaps that was why she spent so much time staring over Carver’s, why she had the field glasses. Mrs Reynolds was a bird-watcher, a twitcher. The word brought him dangerously close to a giggle.

‘Let us know if we can help, won’t you?’ Mr Reynolds patted Eddie’s arm. ‘You know where to find us.’

The Reynolds turned into the access road to the council estate, passing a line of garage doors daubed with swastikas and football slogans. Eddie scowled at their backs. A moment later, he let himself into number 29.