Ben, in the World

‘But I say you can. In the mornings.’

It all started again. He came every morning, and she gave him enough money to eat, and Johnston cross-examined her. ‘Why do you like him, Reet? I don’t get it.’

She didn’t get it either, though she thought enough about Ben. She was not an instructed young woman – or girl, for in fact she was not yet eighteen, Ben’s age – but the subject of his age had not come up. She thought he was probably about thirty-five: she liked older men, she knew.

One of the things they had in common, though they did not know it, was that both had had such a hard childhood. She had left school and run away to London from bad parents, had stolen money, been a thief for a while, and then talked the landlord of the building that housed the minicab firm and this tart’s room up the stairs into letting her have the room when the previous girl left. She was persuasive. She impressed. She had learned that she usually got her way with people. She had met many different kinds, but nothing like Ben. He was outside anything she had been told about, or seen on the television, or knew from experience. When she saw him naked for the first time, she thought, Wow! That’s not human. It was not so much the hairiness of him, but the way he stood, his big shoulders bent – that barrel chest – the dangling fists, the feet planted apart… She had never seen anything like him. And then there were the barking or grunting roars as he came, the whimpers in his sleep – yet if he wasn’t human, what was he? A human animal, she concluded, and then joked with herself, Well, aren’t we all?

Johnston did not interfere again, but he was waiting for some opportunity he could turn to his advantage. It came. Ben asked Rita to go with him ‘to the place where you get birth certificates’. Rita, familiar with the world of casual work, asked why didn’t he try ‘to work casual’ and the story of the building site came out. Her first reaction was that if anyone cheated Ben then Johnston could sort him out – but knew this would not happen. She asked where Ben had got it into his head he must have a birth certificate, heard about the old woman who said it would help get him unemployment benefit. ‘And then what?’ Rita asked, really curious about what unnecessarily lawful plans might be fermenting in that shaggy head.

Talking to Johnston, Rita mentioned that Ben wanted a birth certificate so that with it he could enter the world of proper work and unemployment benefit. Johnston saw his chance. He stopped Ben next time he emerged from Rita’s room, and said to him, ‘I want to talk to you,’ and as Ben crouched, his fists already clenched up, ‘No, I’m not warning you off Reet, I can help you get your papers.’

Now Johnston went back up the stairs to Rita’s, and for the first time the three of them were together in that room, Johnston and Rita sitting side by side on the bed, smoking, while Ben uneasily waited on the chair, wondering if this were a trap, and Rita had turned against him. He was trying to understand.

‘If you have a passport then you don’t need a birth certificate,’ said Johnston.

Ben did know that passports were what people took with them abroad. There had been a trip to France, his father with the other children, while he stayed with his mother. He could not go with them, because he couldn’t behave as they did.

He said he didn’t want to go anywhere, only a paper he could take to the office where – he described it, as a place where people were behind glass walls, and in front of them lines of other people waited for money. It took a long time for him to understand Johnston. In return for a passport, which Johnston could get from ‘a friend who does passports’, he, Ben, would make a trip to France, taking something with him Johnston wanted to give another friend, probably in Nice, or Marseilles.

‘And then shall I come back?’

Johnston had no intention of encouraging Ben to come back. He said, ‘You could stay there a bit and enjoy yourself.’

Ben saw from Rita’s face that she did not like this, though she did not say anything. The idea that he would possess something that he could keep in his pocket, and show a policeman, or a foreman on a building site, persuaded Ben, and he went with Johnston to the machine in the Underground where appeared five little photographs, that Johnston took off with him. The passport, when he was given it, surprised Ben. He was thirty-five years old, it said. He was a film actor: Ben Lovatt. His home address was somewhere in Scotland. Johnston was going to keep this passport ‘for safety’ but Ben demanded it to show the old woman. Yes, he said, he would bring it back at once.

When he stood outside Mrs Biggs’ door he knew the place was empty: he could sense that there was nothing alive in there. He did not knock, but knocked on the neighbour’s door, and heard the cat miaow. He had to knock again, and then at last she came to the door, saw him, and said, ‘Mrs Biggs is in hospital. I’ve got her cat with me.’ Ben had already turned to go off down the stairs, when she said, ‘She’d like it if you visited her, Ben.’

He was appalled: a hospital was everything he feared most, a big building, full of noise and people, and of danger for him. He remembered going to doctors with his mother. Every one of them had had that look. The neighbour understood that he was afraid. She and Mrs Biggs had discussed Ben, knew how hard it was for him to inhabit ordinary life – knew for instance that Ben would go down flight after flight of stairs because the lift so intimidated him.

She said, kindly, ‘Don’t worry, Ben, I’ll tell her you came to see her.’ Then she said, ‘Wait… ’ Left him standing there, returned with a ten-pound note, which she slipped into his breast pocket. ‘Look after yourself, Ben,’ she said, as the old woman would have done.

Ben made his way back to Rita’s. He was thinking about kindness, how it was some people saw him – that was how he put it – really did see him, but were not put off, it was as if they took him into themselves – that was how it felt. And Rita? Yes, she was kind, she felt for him. But not Johnston: no. He was an enemy. And yet there in Ben’s pocket was a passport, with his name in it, and an identity. He was Ben Lovatt, and he belonged to Great Britain which for him until now had been words, a sound, nothing real. Now he felt as if arms had been put around him.

Meanwhile, Rita and Johnston had been quarrelling. She said she didn’t like it, what Johnston was doing to Ben. What would happen to him in France? He couldn’t speak the language. He could only just cope with things here. Johnston had ended the argument with, ‘Don’t you see, Reet, he’ll end up behind bars anyway.’ He meant prison, but Rita heard something else, which in fact Johnston had mentioned during a discussion about Ben: one day the scientists would get their hands on Ben. Rita shrieked at Johnston that he was cruel. She insisted that Ben was nice, he was just a bit different from other people, that’s all.

When Ben arrived back in Rita’s room, he interrupted this quarrel. In both their minds was the word ‘bars’, both imagined cages. Johnston did not care what happened to this freak, but Rita was crying. If ‘they’ got Ben in a cage, he would roar and shout and bellow, and they would have to hit him or drug him, oh yes, she knew how life was, how people were, what one could expect.

Ben sat with his passport in his hand, reluctant to give it back to Johnston, and looked under his deep brows at them and knew it was him they had been quarrelling about. In his family they argued about him all the time. But more than by this angry atmosphere, he was being bothered by the many odours in the room. It smelled of her, the female, but he did not mind that, it was what emanated from Johnston that was making him want to fight or run away. It was a strong, dangerous male smell, and Ben always knew when Johnston had been on the pavement downstairs, or listening on the stairs, to keep a check on Rita. There were a variety of chemical traces in the air, as sharply differentiated from human ones as traffic stinks from the meat smells coming on to a pavement outside a takeaway. He wanted to get up and go, but knew he must not, until this business was settled. Rita was trying to stop Johnston from doing something.

Rita said to Johnston that he should try and get Ben a job, and ‘look after him’.

‘Meaning?’ said Johnston.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I can’t stop some bloke tripping him up on a dark night or pushing him under a bus. He upsets people, Reet. You know that.’

‘Perhaps he could be one of your drivers?’

‘Oh, come on, you’re dreaming.’

But now Rita took the passport from Ben, and said she would look after it, and put it into a drawer. Down they went to the cars, which were inserted here and there among the ordinary parked cars.

‘Get in,’ said Johnston to Ben, opening the door. Ben looked at Rita – Is this all right? – and she nodded. Ben got in behind the driving wheel and at once his face was all delight, exultation. He was thinking of the great glittering roaring accelerating motorbikes that had been the one joy of his life, like nothing else he had known. And now he was behind a wheel, and could put his hands on it, moving it this way and that. He was making a noise like Brrrr, Brrrr, and laughing.

Johnston pulled Rita into the scene with a hitch of his shoulder, so she was standing right by the driver’s seat. He wanted Rita to see, and she did.

‘Now turn the key, Ben,’ he said.

He did not point the key out to Ben, but Ben’s face turned to Rita, for instructions. Rita bent in, touched the key.

Ben fiddled with it, turned it, turned it off as the machine coughed, turned it on, so the car was alive, but grumbled and coughed and died. It was a rackety, cheap third-or fourth-hand car, belonging to a driver who was in between prison sentences for stealing cars.

‘Try again,’ said Rita. Her voice was actually shaking, because she was thinking, Oh, poor Ben, he’s like a three-year-old, and somewhere she had been foolishly believing that he could learn this job. Ben’s hairy fist enclosed the key, and shook it, the car came alive, and now Ben began a pantomime of shifting gears, for he knew that that was what you had to do. It was an automatic.

‘Now,’ said Johnston, leaning right in, and pointing to the lever. ‘I’m going to show you what to do with that.’ And he did, again and again. ‘You squeeze these little side pieces together – see? Then let the brake go – now do it. Then, be careful, watch to see if a car is coming.’ All this was silly; Ben could not see, could not do it. He was making his fist close up tight, watching Johnston’s hand, pulling his hand back and then putting it forward near the brake, but he wasn’t really doing it, because he couldn’t. As Johnston had known.

Rita was crying. Johnston straightened up from the window, and opened the door, and said to Ben, ‘Get out.’ Obedient, Ben got out, not wanting to; he wanted to go on sitting there playing at being a driver. Then Rita said to Johnston, ‘You’re cruel. I don’t like that.’

She went into her doorway, not looking at him or at Ben. Johnston pretended to find work in his cubbyhole, though no customers had turned up, and Ben followed Rita up the stairs.

It was better up there now Johnston’s powerful odours had gone, leaving only memories in the air.

Rita said to Ben, ‘You don’t have to go anywhere, if you don’t want to.’ She sounded sulky, offended, but that was because she was angry at having cried. She did not like showing weakness, and particularly not in front of Johnston.

‘Sit down, Ben,’ she said, and he sat on the chair while she painted her face to hide the marks of tears. Then she made up her eyes again, to look enormous, with the black and green paints. This was so customers would not notice her face, which was not pretty, but pale, or even white, because she was never really well.

‘Why does it say I am a film actor?’ asked Ben.

Rita simply shook her head, defeated, by the difficulty of explaining. She knew he did not go to the cinema, and was able to put herself in his place enough to know that reality was more than enough for him, he could not afford to complicate that by pretence. She did not know that it was the building itself which frightened him: the dark inside, the rows of seats where anybody might be, the tall lit screen, which hurt his eyes.

In fact she had been impressed by Johnston arranging with ‘his friend’ to have actor on the passport. Actors did not work all the time. They were often idle. She had actors among her customers: to be out of work was no crisis for them, though it might be a worry. Ben looked out of the ordinary, but you expected pop stars and actors to look amazing. No, it was a brilliant strategy. In a crowd of film people or the music scene, Ben would not be so conspicuous. But what was Johnston up to? She knew it could be nothing good.

And yet something had to be done about Ben. It was late summer now, but soon it would be autumn, and then winter. Ben had twice been moved on from his favourite bench by the police. What was he going to do in winter? The police knew him. All the homeless and down-and-out people must know him. Probably Johnston was right: Rita had not been to France, but she had been to Spain and Greece, and could imagine Ben more easily in a tapas bar, or a taverna, than a London pub. But Johnston wasn’t concerned for Ben’s well-being, she knew that.

That night, late, when her last customers had gone, and the minicab drivers had gone home, when it was more morning than night, and Ben was crouching in a doorway in Covent Garden, she asked Johnston what he intended for Ben, and when she heard she was angry and tried to hit Johnston, who held her wrists and said, ‘Shut up. It’s going to work, you’ll see.’

Johnston planned to make Ben carry cocaine – ‘A lot, Reet, millions’ – across to Nice, not concealed at all, but in ordinary holdalls, under a layer of clothes. ‘Don’t you see, Reet? Ben is so amazing the narks will be trying to figure him out, they won’t have time for anything else.’

‘And when he gets there?’

‘Why should you care? What’s he to you? He’s a bit of rough for you, that’s all.’

‘I’m sorry for him. I don’t want him to get hurt.’

This was where, in the previous exchange, the word ‘bars’ had arrived. ‘Bars’ were imminent again.

‘He couldn’t manage an aeroplane, he couldn’t manage luggage, what’s he going to do in a place where people don’t speak English?’